Is it possible to integrate play framework 2.0 with an existing web application?

Question

We have a large existing java web application to which I would like to add the play framework - Is this possible, and if so, are there any pointers to how to do this?

The application is a portal application that we are looking to migrate to jboss -- and we would be adding a portal(liferay or gatein) on the jboss application server(so play would need to 'play' with all of the above).

Answer 1

In case of your portal project Play Framework can help you as a backend service to aggregate data or to handle some distributed and computational tasks for your portal.

Play Framework is very powerful with Akka (http://akka.io). Akka can help you handle the complicated computations or tasks in a very easy and manageable way. As an example if your portal connects to multiple third party web services to fetch data for your users, Play, with Akka can handle this very well. With Akka actors, you can fetch the data simultaneously from the third party web services and in return, merge these data and serve to your portal with a single call.

To put simply, you can let Play and Akka do what they are good at and isolate your portal from doing tasks which are not actually about your business logic.

There is this blog called Let It Crash (http://letitcrash.com) which has some very good scenarios on how to use Akka.

Some posts may give your more ideas how you can integrate with your platform:

http://letitcrash.com/post/66094078446/presentation-scaling-out-with-akka-actors

http://letitcrash.com/post/30509298968/case-study-an-auto-updating-cache-using-actors