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Add to SafariWhen comparing Play vs Sinatra, the Slant community recommends Sinatra for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” Sinatra is ranked 18th while Play is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Sinatra is:
Since it has very few dependencies, the loading time for a Sinatra app is considerably small.
Question Ranking
Pros
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 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 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 Play feautures Non-blocking I/O by default
Play Framework is asynchronous from the bottom up: asynchronous is default in Play API.
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 Small loading time
Since it has very few dependencies, the loading time for a Sinatra app is considerably small.
Pro Has only the bare minimum needed
Sinatra has taken an approach of having only the most useful components needed to build applications out of the box. It has simple routes along with a Domain Specific Language over a Rack layer.
Cons
Con Awkward, non-idiomatic Java API
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 Hard to scale well
Because it's rather small and minimalistic, scaling up is not very easy with Sinatra. You need a great deal of knowledge on libraries and modules that may be useful for your particular use-case. As your application grows larger it may be hard to keep things clean and minimalistic, losing a lot of the advantages that Sinatra has.
