Angular2 + Scala Play2?

Question

I am somewhat new to the domain of web development. I am investigating Play2 and am trying to understand, do you need some kind of JS frontend framework to go with Play2 and Scala?

I notice that Play2 has a template engine, but it seems that it generates the HTML on the server and sends it to the browser. Does this mean that the need for a JS frontend like Angular2 is made irrelevant? Or is there still a reason to use Angular2 in a Play2 application? What instances would it make sense and why?

Answer 1

I have some experience of using Play 2 with AngularJS (currently rewriting frontend to Angular2).
I use Play 2 (scala) only for RESTful JSON backend, which is just great for this purpose and I use Angular for single page application frontend. I find this combination brilliant.

My project is hosted on GitHub, you can check it out here

There are three directories in the root:

• restful with all backend stuff, written in scala, using Slick for DB, taking advantage of Play evolutions and all other stuff.
• angularjs-client-deprecated with AngularJS code. I used angular-resource for making calls to backend.
• client with Angular2 code. There is nothing there so far except for my experiments, however I've written a simple service for authentication with security token.

To summarise, I've been developing my project for almost 2 months so far, mainly to learn both Scala and AngularJS (now Angular2).

If you're planning to use JS framework for frontend, I would recommend you to use Play2 only for RESTFul Json backend. I don't see a reason to use Play2 html template engine in this case.