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Add to SafariWhen comparing Play Framework vs Hapi, the Slant community recommends Play Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Play Framework is ranked 13th while Hapi is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Play Framework is:
It's like Java, but more Haskell-y.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Scala
It's like Java, but more Haskell-y.
Pro Asynchronous Core
Pro Interoperable with Java
Pro Fast
Pro Good documentation and a great community
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.
Pro Play is an extensive ecosystem
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.
Pro Simple for beginners
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.
Pro Readable code
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.
Pro Can use Java, one of the most widely known languages
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.
Pro Good Websocket Support
Pro Backed by a major corporation
Hapi was developed and is still being used by Walmart. Being backed by such a major company means that it will not lose support any time soon and most importantly it's being developed by professionals and that you will always get support for it.
Pro Consistency across applications
Hapi's philosophy is that configuration is more important than code. This is especially useful for very large teams because it helps developers maintain consistency and reusability throughout their code.
Cons
Con Backward incompatibility
The jump from Play 1 to Play 2.x caused a lot of confusion. While it is important to have some kind of evolution, sometimes it causes backward incompatibility which can create some problems. It makes tutorials or modules made for the old version obsolete. This can make it hard for beginners to find useful resources. The template engine which used Groovy now uses Scala.
Con Not as many resources to learn
Other languages and frameworks have countless tutorials, books, moocs, etc. Java and Play does not have nearly as much.
Con Requires too much boilerplate
Hapi seems to be made with large applications in mind. The sheer amount of boilerplate code it requires is simply not practical for a small web app. This also means that there are few examples of Hapi applications around for beginners to learn from.
