New Play file watcher for macOS

[Greg Methvin]

Hi everyone,

We've been experimenting with a new implementation of Play's file watcher for macOS. This implementation does not require the JNotify library but instead uses the Carbon file system events API to get notifications asynchronously. This results in a much simpler implementation, and also appears to lead to faster startup times compared to JNotify.

We are not upgrading in Play just yet, but if you are on Mac OS X you can try it out by switching in plugins.sbt:

libraryDependencies += "com.lightbend.play" %% "play-file-watch" % "1.1.0"

Another advantage is that the new implementation is Apache 2 licensed, as opposed to JNotify which is LGPL licensed. That may be a benefit in some enterprise environments.

Cheers,

Greg

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Greg Methvin

Tech Lead - Play Framework

Lightbend, Inc.