Since I currently have 2 unanswered bugs in the Play Framework Github issues for a very long time, I have checked the pulse of the project.
There has been no merge request for the last 18 days. There are still 66 Pull Request waiting to be merged or at least, reviewed. There are 430 issues, most of which are clearly bugs that need a quick fix.
When I go on the official Play Framework, I notice that they try to convince us to use “Akka Serverless” which probably is much more lucrative than Play Framework…
My question: Is there anyone here working for Lightbend or active in the Open source that could let us know about the amount of resources assigned to Play Framework or at least, could let us know what is the roadmap for the next year? Are we still trying to reach a version 3.0 which is 100% stateless? Or in the other hand, if Play Framework is almost abandoned, what is the suggested alternative for people using it in production.
Also, if you are using Play Framework with Java like myself, reading this and asking yourself the same question, please comment so I can see I’m not alone. It could help decide if I fork the project to continue development.
I’ve the same concerns about Play Framework. See Scala is dying, what about Play Framework?. I see the implication in Play Framework development and community decreasing (GitHub and this forum) and the statistics indicate clearly a falling interest about the Scala language, which is the main language for Play Framework. On the other hand, I don’t see a framework as good as Play Framework in Java for modern web development.
Those two factors make me rethinking about using Play Framework for future projects, but this probably won’t be a Java framework…
We have the exact same problem. We use Play on a lot of client projects, and it will be an issue if it dies…
Are there any good alternatives in the Java universe?
Is it time to fork and create a new community? The problem with Lightbend is that they are only targeting big enterprises. We wanted to get a subscription for the Play Framework and we were willing to pay 20’000$ a year - they declined. We have several products based on the Play Framework and we would be willing to invest in the community.
Thank you for uttering your concerns about the radio-silence in the Play GitHub project.
Play has a great community and is being used by many companies around the world as it delivered on the simplified developer experience other web frameworks showed back then.
I’m very sure the Play framework is not abandoned and will stay alive for many years to come.
But I’m afraid we at Lightbend are not able to keep our stewardship of the project as active as we used to for almost a decade.
We are talking with other contributors – both individuals and companies – how we can help to form an active project within the Play community.
Actually could you clarify what Lightbend is (in other words, what products or services does Lightbend sell)? How is the company Lightbend related (historically and currenty) to the Play Framework project?
Lightbend (formerly Typesafe) has been the steward of the Play 2 project since its early days and we’ve had paid staff developing Play 2 as open-source and giving commercial support to our customers.
We’re now looking at making Play’s future more independent of Lightbend.
Here, here! We use Play in a large Java-based application. It would be great to know that there is a future for the framework. For us, the most important development issues is a transition path to Java 17. Additionally, we see similar problems to the sbt-eclipse plugin, which is crucial for us and lets us stick with sbt-1.3.13 in the moment. It would really be great to see that the platform is at least maintained for quite some more time. I will follow here to see if and how we can be of any help in this process.
Just want to chime in to thank @ennru for the update and to ask that you keep as transparent as possible. When you know more, or know when you will know more, please update the community. There is a lot of investment in Play ecosystem and these kinds of transitions can bring a lot of anxiety. I’m sure it will all work out for the best. Thank you Lightbend for the support so far.
Lunatech is organising itself in order to help the community to go further with Play!. I am trying to free time from some of our passionate people to help maintaining Play! as it is the priority. We had a few exchanges with the maintainer and we will do our best to help them wherever they seem fit. With extra help we hope the Playframework can have a future with the current community. As you are maybe aware, I was very involved in the early years of Play! when it was a community driven framework (with a few dictators ;) ). I hope we can have Play! reborn from his hashes and make it one of the most popular framework. After all Play! has already proven to be very successful for a lot of project.
Hi all, play framework together with akka it is still our favorite techstack for backend systems. So we would also like to support the play community with knowledge and time from our developers at innfactory as needed. For our purposes we have written a lot of scala code to use play as a cloud-native web framework like quarkus.
Just published moments ago, this post by Lightbend CEO and co-founder Jonas Bonér will shed some light on the future of Play Framework: On the future of Play Framework
After being on radio silence for a couple of weeks, I finally commented on the current situation.
Please read my comment here and feel free to participate: On the future of Play Framework - #2 by mkurz