Play Framework Essentials

Table of Contents

Play Framework Essentials

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Building a Web Service

Play – a framework used to write web applications

Bootstrapping a Play application

Play applications' layout

URL routing

Route path parameters

Parameters type coercion

Parameters with fixed values

Query string parameters

Default values of query string parameters

Trying the routes

Building HTTP responses

Serializing application data in JSON

Reading JSON requests

Validating JSON data

Handling optional values and recursive types

Summary

2. Persisting Data and Testing

Testing your web service

Writing and running tests

Testing the HTTP layer

Using the reverse router to generate URLs

Running a fake Play application

Effectively writing HTTP tests

Persisting data

Using a relational database

Getting a reference to the currently running application

Using a database management library

Using Slick in Scala

Using JPA in Java

Integrating with other persistence technologies

Populating the database with fixtures

The application's Global object

Managing database schema evolutions

Using an in-memory database for tests

Summary

3. Turning a Web Service into a Web Application

Delta between a web service and a web application

Using the template engine to build web pages

Inserting dynamic values

Looping and branching

Reusing document fragments

Comments

Import statements

Generating HTML forms

Repeated and nested fields

Reading and validating HTML form data

Handling the HTML form submission

Validating the HTML form data

The Scala form validation API

The Java form validation API

Optional and mandatory fields

Sharing JSON validation and HTML form validation rules

Handling content negotiation

Putting things together

Writing web user interface tests

Summary

4. Integrating with Client-side Technologies

Philosophy of Play regarding client-side technologies

Serving static assets

Sprinkling some JavaScript and CSS

Using the JavaScript reverse router

Managing assets from the build system

Producing web assets

Pipelining web assets' transformations

Concatenating and minifying JavaScript files

Gzipping assets

Fingerprinting assets

Managing JavaScript dependencies

Running JavaScript tests

Summary

5. Reactively Handling Long-running Requests

Play application's execution model

Scaling up your server

Embracing non-blocking APIs

Managing execution contexts

Writing incremental computations using iteratees

Streaming results using enumerators

Manipulating data streams by combining iteratees, enumerators, and enumeratees

Unidirectional streaming with server-sent events

Preparing the ground

Transforming streams of data using enumeratees

Implementing a publish/subscribe system using Akka

Bidirectional streaming with WebSockets

Controlling the data flow

Summary

6. Leveraging the Play Stack – Security, Internationalization, Cache, and the HTTP Client

Handling security concerns

Authentication

Cross-site scripting

Cross-site request forgery

HTTP request filters

Using the CSRF filter

Enabling HTTPS

Saving computation time using cache

Serving content in several languages

Calling remote web services

Background – the OAuth 2.0 protocol

Integrating your application with your preferred social network

Implementing the OAuth client

Calling the HTTP API of your preferred social network

Summary

7. Scaling Your Codebase and Deploying Your Application

Making an action's logic reusable and composable with action builders

Capturing the logic of actions that use blocking APIs

Capturing the logic of actions that require authentication

Combining action builders

Modularizing your code

Applying the inversion of control principle

Using dynamic calls in route definitions

Setting up a dependency injection system

Making your code injectable

Mocking components

Splitting your code into several artifacts

Splitting your controller layer into several artifacts

Application deployment

Deploying to your dedicated infrastructure

Deploying to the cloud

Handling per environment configuration

Overriding configuration settings using Java system properties

Using different configuration files

Summary

Index

Play Framework Essentials

Play Framework Essentials

Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: September 2014

Production reference: 1190914

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78398-240-0

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Cover image by Pratyush Mohanta (<tysoncinematics@gmail.com>)

Credits

Author

Julien Richard-Foy

Reviewers

Shannon –jj Behrens

Cédric Chantepie

Commissioning Editor

Amarabha Banerjee

Acquisition Editor

Vinay Argekar

Content Development Editor

Akashdeep Kundu

Technical Editors

Indrajit A. Das

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Copy Editors

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Project Coordinator

Kartik Vedam

Proofreaders

Simran Bhogal

Maria Gould

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Indexers

Monica Ajmera Mehta

Tejal Soni

Graphics

Abhinash Sahu

Production Coordinators

Aparna Bhagat

Manu Joseph

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Author

Julien Richard-Foy likes to design code that seamlessly expresses the ideas he has in mind. He likes finding the right level of abstraction, separating concerns, or whatever else that makes the code easy to reason about, to maintain and to grow.

He works at Zengularity, the company that created the Play framework, and actively contributes to the evolution of the framework.

He aims at working on technically challenging and innovative projects that have a positive environmental or social impact on the world.

About the Reviewers

Shannon -jj Behrens is a staff software engineer at Twitter, working in the Infrastructure and Operations department. He lives in Concord, California, with his lovely wife and seven lovely children. He's well known for his impeccable sense of modesty, world-renowned taste in T-shirts, and poor sense of humor. He blogs at http://jjinux.blogspot.com on a wide variety of topics such as Python, Ruby, Scala, Linux, open source software, the Web, and lesser-known programming languages.

Cédric Chantepie is an IT system architect, with varied development experience (C/C++/ObjC, LISP, JavaEE, Haskell, and Scala), obsessed by software quality (CI, testing, and so on), and involved in open source projects.

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Preface

The Web allows you to make applications that can be used from anywhere in the world as long as there is an Internet connection. The Play framework has been designed to embrace the characteristics of modern web applications such as handling long-running requests and manipulating data streams.

This book shows you how to write such web applications using Play. I designed it to be progressive so that you can quickly write a running application and then enhance it to benefit from all the components of the Play stack, or from lower-level APIs if you need more control.

Code examples are given in both Scala 2.10 and Java 8 (except for some APIs that have no Java counterpart). You can find executable applications based on the code examples of the book at http://github.com/julienrf/pfe-samples.

Finally, I encourage you to browse the API documentation of the framework to complete the content of this book. You can find it online at http://www.playframework.com/documentation.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Building a Web Service, explains how to turn an application into a web service by exposing its resources and features as HTTP endpoints.

Chapter 2, Persisting Data and Testing, shows how you can integrate a persistence system to your Play application and how to write specifications of your HTTP layer.

Chapter 3, Turning a Web Service into a Web Application, goes one step further by showing you how the Play framework can help you to define HTML pages for your application and handle HTML forms.

Chapter 4, Integrating with Client-side Technologies, gives you insights on ways to manage the production of web assets from the build system of your Play application.

Chapter 5, Reactively Handling Long-running Requests, dives deeper in the framework internals and explains how to leverage its reactive programming model to manipulate data streams.

Chapter 6, Leveraging the Play Stack – Security, Internationalization, Cache, and the HTTP Client, presents additional components that are part of the Play stack.

Chapter 7, Scaling Your Codebase and Deploying Your Application, looks back at the code of your application and provides patterns to keep it modular and easy to maintain. It also explains how to deploy your application in a production environment.

What you need for this book

The content of this book is based on Play 2.3.x and shows both Scala and Java APIs. Though this book uses Java 8, Play supports Java 6, so all you need to start developing a Play application is at least JDK 6. Chapter 1, Building a Web Service, explains how to install activator, a command-line tool to generate starter application skeletons and then manage their life cycle (running, testing, and so on). Finally, you also need a web browser to use your applications.

Who this book is for

This book targets Java or Scala developers who already have some knowledge of web development.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: Source files are under the app/ directory.

A block of code is set as follows:

val index = Action {

  Ok(Just Play Scala)

}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

val index = Action {

Ok

(Just Play Scala)

}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ curl -v http://localhost:9000/items

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: If everything works fine, your browser should show a page titled Just Play Scala (or Just Play Java).

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

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Downloading the example code

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Errata

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Piracy

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Questions

You can contact us at <questions@packtpub.com> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.

Chapter 1. Building a Web Service

This chapter will cover the following topics:

Bootstrapping a Play project

Understanding the different pieces of a Play project

Mapping URLs to your service entry points

Serving JSON responses and reading and validating JSON requests

Play – a framework used to write web applications

Play is a framework used to write web applications. As shown in the following diagram, a web application is based on a client-server architecture and uses the HTTP protocol for communication:

Web-oriented architecture

Users have the role of clients and make HTTP requests to servers to interact with the application. The servers process their requests and send them a response. Along the way, the web application might need to make use of various databases or perhaps other web services. This entire process is depicted in the following diagram:

The Play framework's overall architecture

This book will show you how Play can help you to write such web applications. The preceding diagram shows a first big picture of the framework's overall architecture. We will refine this picture as we read through this