Why aren't quotation marks necessary in Play framework controller?

Question

This works:

object Application extends Controller {
  def index = Action {
    Ok(<h1>hello world</h1>)
  }
}

But I would have expected to need to write Ok("<h1>hello world</h1"), using quotation marks. Why isn't this necessary (from a Scala POV)?

Answer 1

Scala supports XML literals as a first-class part of the language: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/131. This is built in to the language and the choice of framework is irrelevant.