Play Framework

Play Framework and Reactive Presos in New York

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.

Building Reactive Apps with the Typesafe Platform

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.

An Alternative to Required API Keys

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.

OSCON Workshop: 6 Minute Apps! Build Your First Modern Web App

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.

Auto-Refresh for Play Framework Apps

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 Special thanks to Josh Suereth for helping me figure out the SBT magic.

Securing Single Page Apps and REST Services

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.

Presenting Play Framework at Devoxx UK & FR 2013

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!