Play 2.6 dropping support for Activator

[Greg Methvin]

Hi all,

As I’m sure many of you know, for the past few major releases the recommended way to get started with Play was using Activator. The original idea of Activator was to be a full featured environment for tutorials, training, and example projects across all of Lightbend’s technologies. Once you got started with Play you could of course just use SBT, but Activator provided a unified platform for getting started with Play and other reactive technologies.

Over time we’ve realized that Activator is not an ideal solution for most Play developers. If you just need a starter project, you shouldn’t need to download a 600MB+ application with a UI for that. There are far simpler and more robust solutions, including giter8 and simply cloning projects from GitHub and modifying them for your needs. We’ve also found that the tutorial aspects of Activator have not been used widely by the community, and most people seem to prefer web-based tutorials and blogs to learn about Play.

Since we believe those solutions are better for the majority of Play users, we’ve decided not to support Activator at all for the coming Play 2.6 release. We’ve updated the Play download page to describe the new methods you can use to get started.

So, how does this impact you?

Creating new applications:

SBT has added support for the sbt new command with support for giter8 templates. We’ve also internally developed an Example Code Service that packages sample projects for download on the Play website. The example projects actually include a local “sbt” executable so there is no need to download anything manually besides the example project.

You can see all Lightbend example projects on the Tech Hub. This also includes many tutorials and guides that were previously on Activator.

Creating and migrating templates:

If you are a template author, we recommend using giter8 instead. You can follow this guide for migrating your template to giter8.

Is activator still working?

You can still run the activator command to compile and package your applications, but we recommend that you adapt your workflow to use sbt directly. This should be easy to achieve since most activator commands (besides “ui” and “new”) just delegate to SBT.

More news about what will happen to existing activator templates will be coming soon.

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback on this. Overall we believe this will be a strong positive change for the Play community and make it much easier to get started with Play.

--

Greg Methvin

Tech Lead - Play Framework

Lightbend, Inc.

[Igmar Palsenberg]

 

As I’m sure many of you know, for the past few major releases the recommended way to get started with Play was using Activator. The original idea of Activator was to be a full featured environment for tutorials, training, and example projects across all of Lightbend’s technologies. Once you got started with Play you could of course just use SBT, but Activator provided a unified platform for getting started with Play and other reactive technologies.

<start of rant>

While you're at it : Consider removing SBT. Really. It's a constant point of pain, and a cause of major loss of productivity. Some issues : 

1) Normal people don't understand it. To be somewhat productive, you need to grasp Scala. This results in copy & paste of random pieces of code until it works

2) It's "incremental compiler" is all but incremental. Compile X java and Y scala sources with 1 error, on the next run it compiles them all again.

3) It's dependency management is full of issues, often requiring a wipe of .ivy2

Really, I take GNU make or Maven over SBT any day.

</end of rant>

Igmar

 

[Greg Methvin]

Hi Igmar,

Maven support is already planned for 3.0. It should already be technically possible to support other build systems now, since we've removed the dependency on SBT in runsupport, but a lot of work still needs to be done to provide the full Play experience on Maven. If you're interested in discussing this feel free to start another topic on the dev list.

Greg

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Play framework dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to play-framework-dev+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Will Sargent]

There's a bunch of improvements to SBT in 0.13.14.

http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.13/docs/sbt-0.13-Tech-Previews.html

There's also a bunch of other options, although Lightbend doesn't officially support them:

Some people really enjoy https://github.com/coursier/coursier but this isn't a thing I have experience with.

There is a 3rd party Gradle plugin: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/play_plugin.html -- I've been using this in some of my local projects and it seems to work well, but I have not personally seen huge / extensively modified Play gradle projects in the field.

There is also a 3rd party Maven plugin: https://github.com/play2-maven-plugin/play2-maven-plugin which I have not used.

--

Will Sargent

Engineer, Lightbend, Inc.

will.s...@lightbend.com

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 1:09 AM, Igmar Palsenberg <ig...@palsenberg.com> wrote:

--

[Igmar Palsenberg]

 

Will the activator be still supported for existing productions services. We have 100s of services in production and we don't have any plan to migrate the services to latest version soon due to number of constraints.

Play 2.6 dropping support for Activator -

Will we be able to build and upgrade the services after the EOL(2017) for existing services or we need to migrate all our services before end of 2017?

activator is simply a layer on top of sbt, so I really don't see the issue here. Just replace it with sbt, and all should be fine.

Igmar 

[Rich Dougherty]

Hi Sahil

Igmar's right about Activator being a wrapper around to sbt. The main thing Activator supported that sbt didn't was creating new projects from templates and a browser based "IDE". The template part at least is now supported by sbt: http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.13/docs/sbt-new-and-Templates.html. At runtime sbt and Activator are identical, so you should be fine for production.

Cheers

Rich

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Play framework dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to play-framework-dev+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Rich Dougherty

Engineer, Lightbend, Inc

@richdougherty