Review - Play Framework Cookbook

This article is a review of Play Framework Cookbook - a new book about the Play framework from Packt Publishing under the Packt Open Source brand.

This book goes way beyond the Play framework documentation, and includes useful practical techniques and source code for Play developers at every level. Every Play developer should have a copy of this book.

Introduction

Play Framework Cookbook is a significant book, because it is the first Play framework book in print from a major publisher, following the Introducing the Play! Framework e-book (also available as a paperback from Lulu. Packt describe themselves as an on-demand publisher, and have beat the other major publishers to market with this book, as they did with their Drools books two years ago. Perhaps O’Reilly is no longer watching the alpha geeks (video from 9:15).

This is a ‘cookbook’, split into ‘recipes’ that each show you how to do one thing, and include the code you need to do it yourself. This skips the very basics, since you don't buy a book for that, and lets the concepts and discussion remain second to simply getting things done.

This kind of book lends itself well to the cookbook format, which avoids attempting to cover a range of topics in equal detail, in the way that a manual does. Instead, the book contains task-oriented tutorial-style content, which is a useful way to structure a book about practical techniques. This is not a reference that explains every detail of Play.

Overview

Although this is not strictly necessary for the cookbook format, this book is split into seven chapters.

1. Basics of the Play Framework
2. Using Controllers
3. Leveraging Modules
4. Creating and Using APIs
5. Introduction to Writing Modules
6. Practical Module Examples
7. Running Into Production
8. Appendix: Further Information About the Play Framework

Many computer books suffer from too much introductory content, with long descriptions of how to do the easy things, providing a more basic description of what is already included in the manual. Fortunately, getting started and using Play by itself is only a minority of the book: only the first chapter includes basic recipes for tasks that are covered more briefly in the Play documentation.

This book is mostly about how to use Play with other technologies: integration with components from broader web and enterprise architectures. This is where a book can go further than the Play framework documentation, and where this particular book does.

Once you start to understand the Play framework better, it actually makes a lot of sense that most of the chapters are about modules. This is because the ideally-structured Play application only contains domain specific data and logic, with functionality that is not domain-specific moved into modules. This book covers topics such as persistence, caching, search, reporting, security and third-party API integration: these are all cross-domain concerns that can be implemented in modules.

Contents

The book starts well, with a foreword that sets the scene with two key observations. First, when you build web applications, it is better to embrace standard web technologies instead of hiding HTTP features under an abstraction layer. Second, a lot of software developers like the Java language and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) run-time environment, which has a lot to offer compared to PHP and Ruby on Rails, for example.

Recipes progress to advanced topics, so Play developers at all levels can learn how to do more with the framework.

Chapter 1 - basics

The first chapter covers the basics of getting started with the Play framework. This is pretty much all covered in the Play documentation’s tutorial, which makes this the weakest chapter in the book, but that does not make the recipes any less useful. What this chapter does better than the Play documentation is to identify a subset of tasks that you need to know how to do to be productive with Play, before moving onto more advanced topics.

Chapter 2 - controllers

Chapter 2 focuses on keeping controllers clean, with custom code and Play modules for additional features. There are some great examples of how to do this, such as the PDF example which shows you how to implement a custom renderer to avoid adding custom render logic to your controllers.

This is perhaps the most important chapter in the book, because the controller layer is where the benefits of Play’s simple but flexible and powerful approach are most apparent: HTTP routing, HTTP request parameter binding, input validation and generating other response types. These are all covered by recipes in this chapter.

The odd one out is the annotation-based routing recipe, since this uses a third-party module (developed by my colleague, Nicolas Leroux) instead of Play framework core functionality. This is also the only recipe that is an alternative solution to a task covered by a previous recipe, in this case the ‘Defining routes’ recipe in the previous chapter.

Chapter 3 - using modules

Chapter 3 - the shortest chapter in the book - is something of an anomaly. This chapter contains recipes that demonstrate several third-party Play modules. This is certainly useful, and gives a good insight into how modules can provide powerful extensions to Play’s core functionality.

However, it does seem a little odd to provide recipes for just five modules from the 95 Play framework modules available at the time of writing, because a cookbook for how to use the many modules is worth a whole book by itself, especially since many of the modules do not have extensive documentation.

In any case, it is useful to see a few examples of the available modules, to prompt further investigation of the Play module repository.

Chapter 4 - using third-party APIs

Chapter 4 follows on from previous chapters by extending the approach used for writing controllers and using modules to recipes that cover integration with third-party APIs. This is an important part of building a modern web application, and this chapter does a good job of picking recipes that demonstrate the different features that Play provides for this: using tags to modularise view template fragments, making web service requests to external services, mapping JSON and XML data, asynchronous requests and caching.

The recipes in this chapter make this all seem easy, which it is, even though these would normally be fairly advanced web application development topics.

Chapter 5 - writing modules

Chapter 5 demystifies the business of writing Play modules, which isolate application functionality and make it available to other applications. This is another very useful set of recipes, because when you are getting started with Play it can take a while to get into the habit of modularising your Play applications. An explanation of how to do it is not nearly as helpful as examples that show you how.

This chapter introduces more advanced techniques: as plug-ins, events, Python commands, using a service interface to prevent a module depending on your application, and using bytecode enhancement to allow a module to modify application code at run-time.

Chapter 6 - module examples

The third chapter about modules combines the ideas from the previous two chapters by showing how Play modules can integrate third-party libraries with Play’s APIs so you can use them as if they were built-in to Play as core functionality. These recipes include model class enhancement to use a non-JPA persistence framework or add full-text search functionality, integrating Play plug-in messages with JMS and replacing the distributed cache implementation.

This chapter’s recipes show you how accessible Play makes this kind of advanced integration, with examples that you can adapt. It is only a shame that there is no example of replacing Play’s Groovy templates with an alternative template engine, to expand the demonstration of how much of what Play provides is pluggable.

Chapter 7 - running in production

The last chapter is the most promising, because continuous integration and production deployment are tasks that edge towards the black arts of devops and system administration. These are perhaps the most practical and useful recipes, because they cover necessary tasks that software developers often lack specialist skills for. This covers a collection of tools including Jenkins, Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd, as well as techniques such as virtual host and SSL configuration.

However, the description of Play application deployment is tantalisingly incomplete. Play currently lacks a standard file distribution and server deployment model, such as the cross-platform WAR deployment supported by Java EE application servers. As with the previous chapter, although the scope of a book like this always has to be limited, it would still have been nice to see platform-specific packaging and deployment instructions for platforms like Debian and Red Hat linux.

Appendix - links to more information

The appendix is a collection of links to several other modules and sources of information about the Play framework. It’s awesome. I would say that, though, because it includes a link to the Lunatech Research web site, where I have published several Play articles, and a list of Twitter accounts, including my own as well as the other Play committers’.

Criticisms

Although this book is well-written and contains relevant content, the layout and typography could certainly be better. The biggest problem is that the code samples are all set in a Courier typeface that is too large, so that lines wrap randomly, made worse by the random number of spaces used to indent code blocks. There are much better monospace typefaces for use in print. The headings are also bizarrely ugly.

Occasionally the structure of the recipes themselves could be improved. Some of the recipes describe concepts without doing a good job of having a clearly-identified task. For example, ‘Understanding session management’ is no more of a recipe than ‘understanding kitchen hygiene’ would be in a conventional cook book; ‘Sticky Chocolate Cake’ - that is what I call a recipe.

Conclusion

The bottom line for a computer book is the combination of the relevance, depth and level of the technical content. This is where Play Framework Cookbook delivers, and this is why it deserves its place on the bookshelf, be it physical or electronic. Although there is room for improvement, all of the other possible (possibly better) Play framework books fail on account of not having been published yet. There is room for more books on this subject, so perhaps we shall see the following hypothetical titles on the shelves in the future.

• Learning the Play Framework - a gentler introduction that does not assume Java knowledge.
• Building web applications with Play and Scala - because not everyone uses Java on the JVM any more.
• Play Modules Cookbook - because there are more Play modules than there are recipes in Play Framework Cookbook.
• Programming Play 2.0 - because Play 2.0 will introduce significant changes.

Meanwhile, every Play developer should read Play Framework Cookbook.