Play Framework Cookbook- Using Play! in a better way- A preview

I had written a brief introductory post about Play! Framework and since then I havent written much about it. Not before I got an opportunity to review the Play Framework Cookbook. Before coming back to Play! I used Gaelyk for a long time and found it really useful to get started quickly on any project. But there I had to setup up lot of things myself (though its coming up with its own Plugins) and this is both Good and Bad- Good because I can configure things myself and thereby have a hold over the features configured and Bad because I had to spend a lot of time on configuring things rather than solving the problem for which the application is being developed. Moreover I had to learn Groovy for that but I could learn a lot of it while using the framework itself. To overcome the Bad things listed a few lines before I was thinking of moving to Grails- the fact that I knew workable amount of Groovy made me think of taking up Grails, but I have a account with an hosting provider which supports Rails/Php and not JVM based applications. This made me think of taking up Rails but I had to learn Ruby for that. So amidst all these confusions I got another opportunity to look back at Play and see if I can make use of the framework now ( and now that I have lot of ideas for the applications to develop).

Meanwhile over a few days (few weeks? hopefully not that much time) I will be reviewing Play Framework Cookbook and alongside see how I can leverage Play for my application development. A quick look at the contents of the book and reading through the Foreword the first 2 chapters would be helpful to understand the basics of Play Framework- it would be a quick overview as the book is not meant to teach the basics of the framework instead to give quick solutions to common use cases of the framework. The per-requisite for the book is to have read through the tutorials and worked through the sample applications using the framework.

As far as I am aware Play Framework Cookbook is one of the two books available for Play Framework. The other being http://www.the-play-book.co.uk/index.php (not sure if this is released/is in print)