Play Framework

Play Framework (backed by Lightbend) is a wildly disruptive, fiercely modern, and incredibly fast platform that completely rebelled against the traditional "Heavy Enterprise Java" architecture. Built for both Java and Scala, Play rejected the slow, XML-heavy, Servlet-based architecture of J2EE and Spring, opting instead for a staggeringly fast, stateless, and fully asynchronous architecture. The absolute core differentiator of Play is its "Hot Reloading and Stateless Asynchronous Core." In traditional Java, if a developer changes a line of code, they have to stop the server, recompile, and restart it (which takes minutes). In Play, you change the code, hit 'refresh' in the browser, and it instantly compiles on the fly. Furthermore, because it uses the Akka toolkit under the hood, it can handle massive, highly concurrent web traffic without blocking server threads. Because it offers the blistering developer speed of Ruby on Rails combined with the massive, type-safe scalability of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), it is massively popular among high-growth startups, massive media companies (like LinkedIn and Verizon), and agile tech teams.