Overview

Play

Stacks757

Followers609

Votes496

GitHub Stars12.6K

Forks4.1K

Spring Boot

Stacks26.8K

Followers24.3K

Votes1.0K

GitHub Stars78.9K

Forks41.6K

Play vs Spring-Boot: What are the differences?

Play and Spring Boot, two prominent frameworks in the Java ecosystem, offer distinct approaches to building web applications. Let's explore the key differences between Play and Spring-Boot.

Architecture: Play framework follows a non-blocking architecture based on the Actor model, which allows handling concurrent requests efficiently. On the other hand, Spring-Boot follows a traditional multi-threaded architecture, where each request is processed by a dedicated thread.
Language Support: Play framework primarily uses Scala for development, which is a statically typed language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). However, it also has extensive support for Java. In contrast, Spring-Boot supports multiple languages, including Java, Groovy, and Kotlin, providing flexibility to developers.
Convention over Configuration Approach: Play framework adopts a convention over configuration approach that emphasizes a standardized structure for application development. It provides a set of predefined naming conventions, reducing the need for explicit configuration. On the other hand, Spring-Boot focuses on configuration over convention, offering a more flexible approach to application development.
Integrated Features: Play framework includes built-in features like an integrated web server, comprehensive REST API support, and real-time updates using WebSocket. In contrast, Spring-Boot doesn't provide an embedded web server by default, requiring external servers like Apache Tomcat. Spring-Boot offers a vast range of integrations with other Spring modules, enabling developers to leverage the extensive Spring ecosystem.
Testing Capabilities: Play framework comes with built-in testing capabilities that facilitate writing unit tests and functional tests for the application. It includes features like Fake Application, Test Server, and Test Browser, making it easier to create robust test cases. In Spring-Boot, although testing is supported, it requires additional frameworks like JUnit or Mockito for comprehensive testing.
Community and Documentation: Play framework has a relatively smaller and more focused community compared to the vast Spring community. Consequently, the documentation and community support for Spring-Boot are more extensive, providing a wealth of resources and community-driven solutions.

In summary, Play emphasizes reactivity and statelessness, while Spring Boot offers a comprehensive, convention-driven framework.

Advice on Play, Spring Boot

Eva

Fullstack developer

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Java

Spring Boot

JavaScript

Hello, I am a fullstack web developer. I have been working for a company with Java/ Spring Boot and client-side JavaScript(mainly jQuery, some AngularJS) for the past 4 years. As I wish to now work as a freelancer, I am faced with a dilemma: which stack to choose given my current knowledge and the state of the market?

I've heard PHP is very popular in the freelance world. I don't know PHP. However, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to learn since it has many similarities with Java (OOP). It seems to me that Laravel has similarities with Spring Boot (it's MVC and OOP). Also, people say Laravel works well with Vue.js, which is my favorite JS framework.

On the other hand, I already know the Javascript language, and I like Vue.js, so I figure I could go the fullstack Javascript route with ExpressJS. However, I am not sure if these techs are ripe for freelancing (with regards to RAD, stability, reliability, security, costs, etc.) Is it true that Express is almost always used with MongoDB? Because my experience is mostly with SQL databases.

The projects I would like to work on are custom web applications/websites for small businesses. I have developed custom ERPs before and found that Java was a good fit, except for it taking a long time to develop. I cannot make a choice, and I am constantly switching between trying PHP and Node.js/Express. Any real-world advice would be welcome! I would love to find a stack that I enjoy while doing meaningful freelance coding.

826k views826k

Comments

Slimane

Jul 9, 2020

Needs adviceon

Spring Boot

NestJS

Node.js

I am currently planning to build a project from scratch. I will be using Angular as front-end framework, but for the back-end I am not sure which framework to use between Spring Boot and NestJS. I have worked with Spring Boot before, but my new project contains a lot of I/O operations, in fact it will show a daily report. I thought about the new Spring Web Reactive Framework but given the idea that Node.js is the most popular on handling non blocking I/O I am planning to start learning NestJS since it is based on Angular philosophy and TypeScript which I am familiar with. Looking forward to hear from you dear Community.

917k views917k

Comments

Anonymous

Sep 15, 2020

Needs adviceon

Kotlin

Django

I’ve been using Django for the last year on and off to do my backend API. I’m getting a bit frustrated with the Django REST framework with the setup of the serializers and Django for the lack of web sockets. I’m considering either Spring or .NET Core. I’m familiar with Kotlin and C# but I’ve not built any substantial projects with them. I like OOP, building a desktop app, web API, and also the potential to get a job in the future or building a tool at work to manage my documents, dashboard and processes point cloud data.

I’m familiar with c/cpp, TypeScript.

I would love your insights on where I should go.

617k views617k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Play	Spring Boot
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 12.6K	GitHub Stars 78.9K
GitHub Forks 4.1K	GitHub Forks 41.6K
Stacks 757	Stacks 26.8K
Followers 609	Followers 24.3K
Votes 496	Votes 1.0K
Pros & Cons
Pros 81 Scala 55 Web-friendly architecture 55 Built on akka 50 Stateless 47 High-scalable Cons 3 Evolves fast, keep up with releases 1 Unnecessarily complicated	Pros 149 Powerful and handy 134 Easy setup 128 Java 90 Spring 85 Fast Cons 23 Heavy weight 18 Annotation ceremony 13 Java 11 Many config files needed 5 Reactive
Integrations
No integrations available	Spring Java

What are some alternatives to Play, Spring Boot?

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

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 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

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

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

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.

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.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.