Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Android SDK vs Play: What are the differences?
Developers describe Android SDK as "An SDK that provides you the API libraries and developer tools necessary to build, test, and debug apps for Android". Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment. On the other hand, Play is detailed as "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.
Android SDK and Play belong to "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category of the tech stack.
"Android development", "Necessary for android" and "Android studio" are the key factors why developers consider Android SDK; whereas "Scala", "Web-friendly architecture" and "Built on akka" are the primary reasons why Play is favored.
Play is an open source tool with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Play's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Android SDK has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1083 company stacks & 905 developers stacks; compared to Play, which is listed in 112 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.
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
I don't have the Scala experience to compare the two, but I can say that Ruby is a wonderful language. For procedural programming where you don't need a lot of concurrent execution threads, it's superior to Node.JS in my opinion. All of the concepts from Typescript have equivalent syntax in Ruby, but there are fewer symbols (e.g. () => { ... }); ) and more keywords (eg 'do ... end'). It's a very flexible language and allows for a lot of different approaches to how it's written, so coding standards and careful organization is important. In the long run, however, you'll find it quicker to debug than Node.JS and just as powerful.
If you are comfortable with TypeScript, why not evolve to a C# ecosystem? Asp.Net Core + Entity Framework is a mature and well supported technology. As far as I can see in the enterprise market, the most adopted choice is still Java. So, maybe you may have a look to SpringBoot - and ultimately Quarkus.
This is advice regardless of your background and requirements. The Play framework has a terrible and complicated design, don't risk it. I even suggest Spring and Kotlin over it! You can use Scala for small services and Data Engineering stuff and benefit optimizations and threading of JVM. RoR, on the other hand, has a huge development speed, which I believe is a big advantage cause you can handle performance bottlenecks later. Also, Scala has another downside, which is featureful in terms of OO and FP paradigms, which makes anyone write code freely with any personal style and makes it a problem in a team, Hence a coding style has to be defined if there would be Scala development team.
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.
We actually initially wrote a lot of networking code in Kotlin but the complexities involved prompted us to try and compile NodeJS for Android and port over all the networking logic to Node and communicate with node over the Java Native Interface.
This turned out to be a great decision considering our battery usage fell by 40% and rate of development increased by a factor of 2.
Pros of Android SDK
- Android development289
- Necessary for android156
- Android studio128
- Mobile framework86
- Backed by google82
- Platform-tools27
- Eclipse + adt plugin21
- Powerful, simple, one stop environment5
- Free3
- Больно3
Pros of Play
- Scala81
- Web-friendly architecture55
- Built on akka55
- Stateless50
- High-scalable47
- Fast46
- Open source40
- Java34
- High velocity27
- Fun24
- Lightweight9
- Non-blocking io8
- Developer friendly6
- Simple template engine5
- Scalability4
- Pure love3
- Resource efficient2
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Android SDK
Cons of Play
- Evolves fast, keep up with releases3
- Unnecessarily complicated1
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Android SDK?
What is Play?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Android SDK?
What tools integrate with Play?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+3
+3
+47
+37