Play2: A New Era of Web Application Development

Today's Web evolutions and the emergence of software as a service and Web services have led to new challenges in programming: distribution, scalability, management of various data formats, stream management, and so on. A Web framework that considers these issues can significantly aid developers in capitalizing on the opportunities the Web offers while minimizing potential risks. The open source Play2 framework does just that by leveraging the strengths of functional programming. This article outlines functional programming's power in this context at several levels: data and data format manipulation using higher-order functions; reactive composition with nonblocking IO for scalability; and reactive stream processing and manipulation using Iteratees with WebSockets and Server-Sent Events.