Play and Akka-http: what is the plan?

[Julien Richard-Foy]

Hi,

With the recent efforts toward modularizing Play, the current effort to replace iteratees with reactive-streams and the evolutions of Akka-http, it seams to me that Play and Akka-http are converging to the same thing.

How will Play 3 compare with Akka-http ? Is there any gain in maintaining two HTTP clients (play-ws vs akka-http)?

Regards,

Julien

[Rich Dougherty]

Hi Julien

Here are my thoughts on the Play server backend plan.

1. Play 2.4 is Iteratees/Netty + experimental Iteratees/Akka-HTTP backend

2. Play 2.5 is going to be Akka-Streams/Netty + experimental Akka-Streams/Akka-HTTP backend

3. Play 2.6/3.0 is going to be Akka-Streams/Akka-HTTP, assuming the Akka HTTP backend is stable enough and fast enough

James, does this sound right to you?

I'm not too sure about the plan for WS. We should probably eventually standardise on a WS library that uses Akka Streams and wraps Akka HTTP, so that WS is consistent with the Play server backend.

Cheers

Rich

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Rich Dougherty

Engineer, Typesafe, Inc

@richdougherty

[James Roper]

Hi Julien,

Rich's roadmap is correct.  As for the long term vision with Play and Akka HTTP, the intent is that akka-http-core will be a low level high performance http library, similar to Netty, and then the higher level akka-http API, with the routing DSL etc, will converge with Play, so that eventually there is no high level API in akka-http, it's all in Play.  The biggest feature of akka-http that Play will adopt is the routing DSL.  We're planning on converging the request/response modelling in Play 3 anyway.  Other things we'll seek to do in Play is make the core lighter weight (less dependencies) so that it "feels" lightweight to embed.

Cheers,

James

James Roper
Software Engineer

Typesafe – Build reactive apps!
Twitter: @jroper