will playframework version 1 become obsolete?

Question

Now that playframework has a new version 2 that is completely different from version 1; what will happen to the latter? should all projects written in play 1 be migrated to version 2 absolutely? I wonder if one could rely on play 1 not becoming obsolete and unsupported in the near or medium future?

Answer 1

One of the key statements that has been given from the core development team, is that they themselves have many apps written in Play 1.x, and therefore, they will continue to support Play 1.x. Play has been around for quite a while now, and even before it was public, it was being used by Zenexity as the framework for building their client's web apps.

They are not looking to go back and re-engineer the Play 1.x web apps, and in many ways, the support and community around 1.x is stronger than 2. If you are looking to start to use more real-time features, then maybe you should move to Play 2, but if you are happy with what Play 1 offers...why move? Nicolas Leroux and some of the other core developers have committed to maintaining the Play 1 project, and since Play 2 was released, 1.2.5 has been rolled out, and 1.3 is on its way.

That said, if you do decide to migrate, I would highly recommend using the Groovy template engine for 2.x as it may make the migration process easier.

Personally, I prefer 1.x to 2.x, but that is a pure matter of taste. I invested a lot of time into 1.x, and know it well, and the 2.x features are not enough to pull me away from the ease and beauty of Play 1.