Twirl VS twirl-in-scala-standalone-example

You could quibble with this description, but Play is an opinionated packaging of several technologies—all of which could be used alone or cobbled together by hand. Out of the box, you get tooling that compiles web assets through a pipeline (sbt-web, with features like versioning through sbt-digest), a powerful templating language (Twirl), a routing DSL, request handlers (Actions), of course, a non-blocking HTTP stack (Akka HTTP), and a few other bells and whistles useful to building full-stack web applications. These are a lot of parts to maintain together. It's a considerable challenge to provide so much under the auspice of one project. Play's combination of all these parts also necessitates specific ways to build your web application or service—which, I think, a lot of developers don't like, which has contributed to it falling out of favor.

Scala Twirl template engine can be use in standalone applications, without the need for Play Framework. I personally like to use it and for my use case I was able to solve the problem faster than trying to figure out Apache httpd mod_macro or mustache. If you like to check out complete project, you can find it on GitHub. Enjoy!