Playframework vs Typesafe Activator - What is the main difference

Question

I have read lot of articles about typesafe activator, including recent Reactive manifesto, but I am still not clear between major difference between typesafe activator and Playframework. Can anyone who have used both summarize it for me?

BTW - I am aware that typesafe activator is more of stack unlike Play! which is only webframework, but I am looking at differences only from webframework perspectives as I am not planning to use other items in stack.

Answer 1

Activator is built with Play and it is, in my opinion, just a webapp where you can monitor, compile, run, test and code your application. You can also create new Play app with activator by choosing one of the available skeleton projects (templates). Instead of doing it via the Terminal.

Activator is caching the terminal output for 20 minutes, but if you buy a subscription plan it will show you all output of your app. Obviously they want to make some money with activator too :)

Did you read these docs: http://www.typesafe.com/activator and http://typesafe.com/activator/docs

You should also check out this video, by James Ward, he built the activator too (if I recall correctly): http://vimeo.com/78892176

Addition by James: To add a bit more clarity: Activator is a CLI and Web UI for creating, running, testing, and monitoring Typesafe Platform apps (Play Framework, Akka, Scala). Also, there isn't any caching that differs between Activator and having a subscription. There is the Console which can be used in production for monitoring and that requires a subscription. But that should be the only difference.