Play Framework

This week I will be in New York presenting about Play Framework and Reactive Apps. Here is the lineup:

Diving Into Play Framework’s Deep End - Tuesday, October 8

Play Framework is simple to get started with, but it also has some very advanced and powerful features. This session will explore some of these features, including Action Composition, Filters, Reactive Requests, WebSockets, Advanced JSON, and Dependency Injection. Through lots of code, you’ll dive (or be thrown) into the deep end of Play.

It is becoming pretty clear that Reactive is the next big thing in software. But there aren’t very many resources yet about how to actually build a Reactive application. Recently I hosted a webinar about “Building Reactive Apps with the Typesafe Platform” where I tried to explain Reactive in a tangible way using the Reactive Stocks sample app from Typesafe Activator. Here is the recording of that presentation:

Let me know what you think. Thanks!

Requiring API keys to JSON services for publicly available data is leading us down the unfortunate path to screen scraping and HTML parsing. The justification for requiring API keys is that abuses of these data APIs are rampant and without the keys there would be no way to deal with bad behavior. Rate limiting is one approach but it is easily gamed. We need a better solution.

Required keys make it much harder for developers to learn new things. I recently created a sample application for Typesafe Activator called Reactive Stocks which fetches publicly available tweets and then does a sentiment analysis on the tweets. The goal of the sample is to quickly teach developers about how to build Reactive applications. If each developer had to go through the process of setting up Twitter API keys just to get the app running, many would give up. Most developers prefer to instantly see something working and then deconstruct it to learn how it works.

Next week at OSCON 2013 in Portland I’ll be leading a hands-on workshop on Monday at 1:30pm where we’ll build a modern web app with Play Framework and Scala. Here are the details:

6 Minute Apps! Build Your First Modern Web App

The web application landscape is rapidly shifting back to a Client/Server architecture. This time around, the Client is JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the browser. The tools and deployment techniques for these types of applications are abundant and fragmented.

Over this past weekend I built a little tool for Play Framework app developers which auto-refreshes an app in Chrome when the source code or static assets change.

Check out a video demonstration:

For information on how to set it up, check out the project on GitHub: https://github.com/jamesward/play-auto-refresh

The move towards Single Page Apps and RESTful services open the doors to a much better way of securing web applications. Traditional web applications use browser cookies to identify a user when a request is made to the server. This approach is fundamentally flawed and causes many applications to be vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. When used correctly, RESTful services can avoid this vulnerability altogether. Before we go into the solution, lets recap the problem.

This Wednesday (April 24, 2013) I’ll be presenting an Intro to Play Framework at the Boulder Area Scala Enthusiasts meetup. Also, Dustin Whitney will be presenting an Intro to Scala.

Hopefully see you in Boulder!

This week I’m at Devoxx UK and Devoxx FR presenting about Play Framework. Here are the sessions:

• Tuesday March 26 @ Devoxx UK: Mobile Apps with HTML5 & Play Framework - With Nicolas Leroux
• Wednesday March 27 @ Devoxx FR: 6 Minute Apps! Build Your First Modern Web App - With Nicolas Leroux
• Thursday March 28 @ Devoxx FR: Play Framework vs. Grails Smackdown - With Matt Raible

It’s going to be an awesome week!

This week I’ll be in Canada presenting an Introduction to Play Framework:

• Toronto Scala Meetup on Tuesday, March 19
• Ottawa Scala Enthusiasts on Wednesday, March 20
• Scala Montreal Meetup on Thursday, March 21

I’m looking forward to meeting our Scala northerly neighbors!

Tonight I will be doing a question and answer session at the Seattle Scala User Group. So bring your Scala, Akka, and Play Framework questions! Hope to see you there.