Play VS Graal

Compare Play vs Graal and see what are their differences.

Graal

GraalVM compiles Java applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀 (by oracle)
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Play Graal
31 156
12,508 19,765
0.2% 0.9%
9.7 10.0
about 6 hours ago 6 days ago
Scala Java
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Play

Posts with mentions or reviews of Play. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-02.
  • Play Framework 2.9.0 Release Candidate
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2023
  • Reflex – Web apps in pure Python
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Aug 2023
    My major complain here is that, as far as being a web framework there is precious little information here about the framework. How does this framework scale with multiple requests? What concurrency strategy is it using (threads, processes, actors, etc?). Is this opinionated (it doesn't seem so but it also doesn't say it isn't either). How does this work with popular libraries x,y,z. The full docs have a little bit more information, but not a ton. But mostly there are some cute toy examples and "built in python" and thats about it.

    Lets compare this with for example play https://www.playframework.com/ I know from this that it built on Akka, its stateless, aims for predictable resource consumption, has non-blocking io, etc. There is a ton of really important information on what does this web framework actually do that is really important when you are making a choice of a framework.

    I have no idea how good this framework is, but besides a few toy examples, I can't see anything that makes me thing "wow this is great I need to use this".

  • Play (1) Linux manual page
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jun 2023
    A web application framework for Java/Scala: https://www.playframework.com/
  • Scala opensource projects
    4 projects | /r/scala | 6 May 2023
  • Play Framework for Java and Scala
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 May 2023
  • What is scala's modern Web API framework?
    5 projects | /r/scala | 7 Mar 2023
    Scala 3 migration isn't as simple as migrating other apps, you can track the work at https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11260
  • How does web developement process compare to java web developement ?
    1 project | /r/Python | 2 Mar 2023
    And there are frameworks you can use to make development easier, like Play. And Java has plenty of choices for dependency injection frameworks.
  • what library/framework should I use for backend development?
    3 projects | /r/scala | 21 Feb 2023
    However do note, Play should be perfectly usable as well, and it's still maintained by the community: https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11649
  • Why I selected Elixir and Phoenix as my main stack
    36 projects | dev.to | 21 Jan 2023
    In university I learned a bit of Java, so maybe I could use it professionally I guess?. There were many options to choose from. DropWizard, Spark, Play Framework. But the more documented one in the internet I found was Springboot, besides there were some courses in spanish and some friends that knew something about Springboot, so I give it a chance.
  • Right way to use AWS & Scala
    1 project | /r/scala | 6 Nov 2022
    For a backend web server I use Play - https://www.playframework.com/ which I find to be the easiest one as a backend web server. For learning/using spark I found this course from coursera to be very useful. https://www.coursera.org/learn/scala-spark-big-data

Graal

Posts with mentions or reviews of Graal. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-17.
  • Java 23: The New Features Are Officially Announced
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    Contrary to what vocal Kotlin advocates might believe, Kotlin only matters on Android, and that is thanks to Google pushing it no matter what.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

    https://snyk.io/reports/jvm-ecosystem-report-2021/

    And even so, they had to conceed Android and Kotlin on their own, without the Java ecosystem aren't really much useful, thus ART is now updatable via Play Store, and currently supports OpenJDK 17 LTS on Android 12 and later devices.

    As for your question regarding numbers, mostly Java 74.6%, C++ 13.7%, on the OpenJDK, other JVM implementations differ, e.g. GraalVM is mostly Java 91.8%, C 3.6%.

    https://github.com/openjdk/jdk

    https://github.com/oracle/graal

    Two examples from many others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

  • FLaNK Stack 05 Feb 2024
    49 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2024
  • Apple releases Pkl – onfiguration as code language
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2024
    Pkl was built using the GraalVM Truffle framework. So it supports runtime compilation using Futurama Projections. We have been working with Apple on this for a while, and I am quite happy that we can finally read the sources!

    https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle

    Disclaimer: graalvm dev here.

  • Live Objects All the Way Down: Removing the Barriers Between Apps and VMs
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jan 2024
    That's pretty interesting. It's not as aggressive as Bee sounds, but the Espresso JVM is somewhat similar in concept. It's a full blown JVM written in Java with all the mod cons, which can either be compiled ahead of time down to memory-efficient native code giving something similar to a JVM written in C++, or run itself as a Java application on top of another JVM. In the latter mode it obviously doesn't achieve top-tier performance, but the advantage is you can easily hack on it using all the regular Java tools, including hotswapping using the debugger.

    When run like this, the bytecode interpreter, runtime system and JIT compiler are all regular Java that can be debugged, edited, explored in the IDE, recompiled quickly and so on. Only the GC is provided by the host system. If you compile it to native code, the GC is also written in Java (with some special conventions to allow for convenient direct memory access).

    What's most interesting is that Espresso isn't a direct translation of what a classical C++ VM would look like. It's built on the Truffle framework, so the code is extremely high level compared to traditional VM code. Details like how exactly transitions between the interpreter/compiled code happen, how you communicate pointer maps to the GC and so on are all abstracted away. You don't even have to invoke the JIT compiler manually, that's done for you too. The only code Espresso really needs is that which defines the semantics of the Java bytecode language and associated tools like the JDWP debugger protocol.

    https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/espresso

    This design makes it easy to experiment with new VM features that would be too difficult or expensive to implement otherwise. For example it implements full hotswap capability that lets you arbitrarily redefine code and data on the fly. Espresso can also fully self-host recursively without limit, meaning you can achieve something like what's described in the paper by running Espresso on top of Espresso.

  • Crash report and loading time
    1 project | /r/fabricmc | 15 Nov 2023
    I'm also using GraalVM if that's of any help.
  • Quarkus 3.4 - Container-first Java Stack: Install with OpenJDK 21 and Create REST API
    7 projects | dev.to | 16 Oct 2023
    Quarkus is one of Java frameworks for microservices development and cloud-native deployment. It is developed as container-first stack and working with GraalVM and HotSpot virtual machines (VM).
  • Level-up your Java Debugging Skills with on-demand Debugging
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Oct 2023
    Apologies, I didn't mean to imply DCEVM went poof, just that I was sad it didn't make it into OpenJDK so one need not do JDK silliness between the production one and the "debugging one" since my experience is that's an absolutely stellar way to produce Heisenbugs

    And I'll be straight: Graal scares me 'cause Oracle but I just checked and it looks to the casual observer that it's straight-up GPLv2 now so maybe my fears need revisiting: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/vm-23.1.0/LICENSE

  • Rust vs Go: A Hands-On Comparison
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Sep 2023
    > to be compiled to a single executable is a strength that Java does not have

    I think this is very outdated claim: https://www.graalvm.org/

  • Leveraging Rust in our high-performance Java database
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2023
  • Java 21 makes me like Java again
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Sep 2023
    https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Play and Graal you can also consider the following projects:

Spring Boot - Spring Boot

Liberica JDK - Free and 100% open source Progressive Java Runtime for modern Javaâ„¢ deployments supported by a leading OpenJDK contributor

Scalatra - Tiny Scala high-performance, async web framework, inspired by Sinatra

Adopt Open JDK - Eclipse Temurinâ„¢ build scripts - common across all releases/versions

Quarkus - Quarkus: Supersonic Subatomic Java.

awesome-wasm-runtimes - A list of webassemby runtimes

Finatra - Fast, testable, Scala services built on TwitterServer and Finagle

SAP Machine - An OpenJDK release maintained and supported by SAP

Lift - Lift Framework

maven-jpackage-template - Sample project illustrating building nice, small cross-platform JavaFX or Swing desktop apps with native installers while still using the standard Maven dependency system.

Http4s - A minimal, idiomatic Scala interface for HTTP

wasmer - 🚀 The leading Wasm Runtime supporting WASIX, WASI and Emscripten