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Play vs Revel: What are the differences?
# Introduction
This markdown provides a comparison between Play and Revel web frameworks.
1. **Language Support**: Play primarily supports Java and Scala while Revel is designed for Go language development.
2. **Architecture**: Play follows a more traditional MVC pattern, allowing developers to structure their applications with models, views, and controllers. In contrast, Revel incorporates a convention over configuration approach, providing a predefined structure for developers to follow.
3. **Performance**: Play is known for its scalability and high performance due to its asynchronous and non-blocking nature, making it suitable for real-time applications. Revel, on the other hand, provides a simpler and more straightforward structure, leading to faster development but potentially sacrificing some performance optimizations.
4. **Community and Support**: Play has a larger and more established community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and resources available. Revel, being a newer framework, might have a smaller community and fewer resources to rely on for support.
5. **Learning Curve**: Play, with its more extensive feature set and flexibility, can have a steeper learning curve for beginners. Revel's simpler structure and conventions aim to reduce the learning curve and allow developers to get started more quickly.
6. **Tooling and Integration**: Play has strong integration with popular build tools like SBT and Maven, along with support for IDEs like IntelliJ and Eclipse. Revel provides tools like Revel command-line interface for project management but may lack the extensive tooling support available for Play.
In Summary, Play and Revel differ in terms of language support, architecture, performance, community, learning curve, and tooling and integration.
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.
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
Pros of Revel
- Go16
- High-Productivity6
- Full-Stack5
- High performance4
- MVC4
- Open source2
- Simple1
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Cons of Play
- Evolves fast, keep up with releases3
- Unnecessarily complicated1
