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  1. Stackups
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  5. MEAN vs Play

MEAN vs Play

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Play
Play
Stacks752
Followers609
Votes496
GitHub Stars12.6K
Forks4.1K
MEAN
MEAN
Stacks337
Followers617
Votes594
GitHub Stars12.1K
Forks3.4K

MEAN vs Play: What are the differences?

MEAN: A Simple, Scalable and Easy starting point for full stack javascript web development. MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you a quick and organized way to start developing MEAN based web apps with useful modules like Mongoose and Passport pre-bundled and configured; Play: The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala. Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

MEAN and Play can be primarily classified as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.

"Javascript", "Easy" and "Nosql" are the key factors why developers consider MEAN; whereas "Scala", "Web-friendly architecture" and "Built on akka" are the primary reasons why Play is favored.

MEAN and Play are both open source tools. MEAN with 11.8K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Play has a broader approval, being mentioned in 112 company stacks & 47 developers stacks; compared to MEAN, which is listed in 37 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.

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Advice on Play, MEAN

Leonardo
Leonardo

Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital

Mar 22, 2021

Needs adviceonTypeScriptTypeScriptRailsRailsScalaScala

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

2.74M views2.74M
Comments
Hosam
Hosam

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 18, 2021

Review

If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.

The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.

On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.

If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.

53.4k views53.4k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Play
Play
MEAN
MEAN

Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you a quick and organized way to start developing MEAN based web apps with useful modules like Mongoose and Passport pre-bundled and configured.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
12.6K
GitHub Stars
12.1K
GitHub Forks
4.1K
GitHub Forks
3.4K
Stacks
752
Stacks
337
Followers
609
Followers
617
Votes
496
Votes
594
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
Pros
  • 86
    Javascript
  • 62
    Easy
  • 58
    Nosql
  • 52
    Great community
  • 50
    Modularity
Integrations
No integrations available
MongoDB
MongoDB
Node.js
Node.js
ExpressJS
ExpressJS
AngularJS
AngularJS

What are some alternatives to Play, MEAN?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

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