When comparing Play vs Adonisjs, the Slant community recommends Adonisjs for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” Adonisjs is ranked 15th while Play is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Adonisjs is:
If you are already programming in PHP with Laravel, you will have no trouble starting development with Node using Adonis.
Specs
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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 Based on Laravel PHP Framework
If you are already programming in PHP with Laravel, you will have no trouble starting development with Node using Adonis.
Pro Similar to Rails
Pro Built-in modules for everything
There are built-in modules for everything: Auth, Social Auth, mailing ect
Pro Easy to learn, especially if you're already familiar with Laravel
Pro Has websocket support out of the box
Pro Very good documentation
Pro Option for full-stack or api standalone implementation
You can choose to use the full-stack version or if you wish to build a RESTful API you can choose to use the api standalone version.
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 No NOSQL integration
Only used ORM, not ODM.