I have been looking into the Play Framework as a possible candidate for helping me to build a simple API. However, the Django Rest Framework (DRF) also seems to be a pretty strong contenter.
As far as I can tell, the DRF does not advertise itself to be an asynchronous (or non-blocking) framework like the Play Framework does, but I am interested in whether or not this even matters. The situation that I keep thinking of is sending an email to a user via Mandrill -- I do not want my API to get bogged-down waiting for the Mandrill API to tell it whether or not the email was sent.
Thus, I think the question can be summarized like this: is there a benefit from the client's perspective that will result from my building an API with an asynchronous/non-blocking framework like Play over the DRF, or am I missing the point?