Talks & Drinks

Peter Hilton - Scaling business application development with Play and Scala

Scaling web applications is usually about runtime performance for high-traffic consumer applications. This talk is about a different kind of scaling: architectures that increase development speed for business applications. Using Play and Scala for something that would be easy to build with PHP is like going for a drive in a Rolls Royce: it's so smooth that you don't realise how fast you're going.

Two case studies of commercial projects illustrate using Play and Scala to complete development so easily it feels like cheating. Both projects used Play, Scala, Slick, Bootstrap and minimal JavaScript or front-end development. The lessons learned from these projects show how this architecture makes trade-offs between development cost and complexity. Best of all, there wasn't any PHP at all.

Daniel Westheide - Building well-behaved web APIs with Play: The obstacles and how to overcome them

Building applications that follow the REST architectural style can be quite cumbersome. Like most other web frameworks out there, the Play Framework does not support you a lot in building well-behaved web APIs. On the other hand, it makes implementing not-so-restful HTTP APIs super easy. As a consequence, developers choose the path of least resistance.

However, the Play Framework is actually quite flexible and modular, so we can replace parts that hinder us and add abstractions that help building RESTful web APIs.

After a motivational introduction to the nature of truly RESTful web APIs, Daniel will explain where Play gets in the way of building them and show how we can overcome these obstacles. I will introduce libraries for supporting common hypermedia formats and show how to implement Play-based web APIs in a resource-oriented manner.

Schedule

• 18:30 Food & Drinks

• 19:00 Scaling business application development with Play and Scala

• 20:00 Building well-behaved web APIs with Play: The obstacles and how to overcome them

• 21:00 Chats