Tapestry5 vs Play framework

Question

I know there are many questions here comparing one framework with another. I feel i have to add one more.

What is the advantage of play framework over Tapestry5 framework? Which one would you recommend and why?

Here are the similarities that i have found.

1. Both are stateless frameworks (i know play is more stateless)
2. Both really boost developer productivity with live class reloading

Why would one choose one over the other. I have used both to do a 'glorified hello world' type of applications and i feel like both are very similar.

Answer 1

Also note that Play does not appear to be (directly?) compatible with standard application servers; it doesn't use the Servlet API, but it's own definitions of Request and Reponse.

It's rather draconian as well, recompiling/reloading Java classes on each request (sorry if this is FUD, it's what I remember from the JavaOne talk).

It is not component based, it's an action based framework, like Struts or SpringMVC; it uses templates that are an improvement on JSPs but lacks Tapestry more full-cycle approach. Much of the power of Tapestry comes from building complex functionality from simple elements.

Tapestry includes very sophisticated technology for dealing with assets (images, stylesheets, JavaScript libraries) that are packaged inside JARs. It's all transparent to the user and to the developer, just drop the JARs on the classpath and they automatically load and configure.

I think Play! has some good ideas, and a very good name, but its playing in a different league than Tapestry. It's rather draconian in avoiding any server-side state ... by contrast, Tapestry uses limited amounts of server-side state and manages that state carefully, and does so largely to embrace redirect-after-post semantics.

There's only so far you can go in an action oriented framework when you have the same behaviors spanning many different pages. Although I, personally, would use Tapestry even on a single-page application, it's true that Tapestry really shines when developing larger-scale apps with larger teams.

Answer 2

I have no direct experience with Tapestry. But a colleague in a project where we use Play has worked with it, and he was really fed up with it. He had many complains, but you can find most of them listed here*.

Personally, I think the main comparison points between Play and other frameworks are:

• Quick turnaround (edit-build-deploy cycle disappears)
• Quick development/prototyping
• Support of Scala (natively)
• User happiness using the framework/community (if users complain about the framework/community, that means something)

If your framework supports all this as well as Play, then you can go deeper into details, like if it's a stateless/stateful framework, etc.

*Wayback machine version because the post has been deleted from stack overflow.