Ruby on Rails vs Play Framework

The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers.

There are many third-party plugins (Ruby gems) available for Rails development. The larger ones and those that have a lot of downloads and users are very well documented and easy to use.

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters.

presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
    print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end

MVC is a great starting point, and perfect for APIs. You'll rarely if ever have to wonder "where should I put this code?"

The large number of documentation, tutorials, videos and guides which help new developers who are just starting with Rails make it seem very easy to create a small and simple application by relying on code generation and components that come out of the box with Rails.

Rails is supported on every major Cloud hosting service nowadays. There are also countless tutorials that help developers deploy their Rails apps if there are any problems on the way.

It's like Java, but more Haskell-y.

Play has quite a large community which provides numerous tutorials and videos related to developing with Play.
The Play official documentation covers many things, such as the framework itself but also specific stuff such as Akka, SBT and Netty.

There are also many big companies that base their main sites around Play, one of them is LinkedIn which provides third-party documentation on a regular basis.

Play uses Akka for concurrency, Scala for a templating engine, Netty as a client-server framework and SBT (Simple Build Tool) for building. And they all come out of the box.
Play also comes with the option to scaffold your applications. Play is an all-embracing ecosystem designed to increase developer productivity and shorten development times.

Play is very simple to get started. The documentation is very helpful for beginners and advanced users alike and the official website has a great "Getting Started" tutorial to begin developing with Play.

Play framework's convention over configuration methodology makes most Play projects have a very similar structure. This means that the code written for the framework is very readable. This enables a developer to switch between applications without having to relearn the ecosystem for every project. The built-in templating system also helps with code and makes it possible to have a very low count of lines of code.

Java is one of the most widely known languages, so people coming from that background can jump right in and not have to learn a new language syntax.