I'm analyzing on using Spring framework with Play 2.1 to support DI. Apart from DI, can i also use spring's AOP interceptors, transaction, DAO and REST support with Play 2.1? I'm not sure whether it is the right approach. If not, what is the best way to handle these things with Play? Are there any inbuilt support in Play on these areas or do i need to go with separate libraries like AspectJ, Guice, Jersey etc?
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2 Answers
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Yes you can integrate Spring with the Play Framework. I did it in a project just some weeks ago. As shown in the tutorial linked by Pere Villega this can easily be achived by extending GlobalSettings. This way also works for other DI solutions like Guice (as shown here). As far as I know, there currently is no native solution for DI in Play 2.x.
Of course you can also use other features provdided by Spring, like their DAO support or transaction management (however this may require further configuration). We even used Spring Data's MongoDB support.
Just some personal note: I really like the Play Framework for building typical Java MVC webapps, but I found it quite temperamental for building an API only. So if you are also writing your web client using Play, the provided routing and templating are great and give you a head start. For a pure REST service however I ended up using JAX-RS (on Jersey), some basic Spring components and Jetty. We then wrote the web client completely in JavaScript using Backbone, Node and Airbnb's Rendr.
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Play has it's own way of managing REST, transactions (depending on the JPA library used) and interceptors.
You can integrate it with Spring, see this demo in github, but I'd first think about if you really need it.
