Play Framework 2 RC2 has been released and it is quickly becoming a mature and productive way to build modern web apps. Lets walk through building a quick app with Play 2, Scala, Anorm, JSON, CoffeeScript, and jQuery. Once the app works locally we will deploy it on the cloud with Heroku. (Note: This is the Play 2 + Scala version of my Play 1 + Java tutorial.) You can grab the completed source from GitHub.
UPDATE: This tutorial is for Play 1.x (an old version). Check out my Play 2 Tutorial if you want to get started with the latest stuff. (Thanks to John Borys for pointing this out.)
If you are a Java developer then you really need to give Play Framework a try. It is really refreshing to take a few minutes, step out of the legacy-feeling world of traditional Java web app development and into something modern and fun. I want to walk you through a very simple tutorial where we will build a web application with Play Framework. The application will use JPA for persistence and expose access to the data through a JSON over HTTP interface. The client-side of the application will be built with jQuery. Lets get started.