Summary

This chapter gave you an idea of the Play framework, but it contained enough material to show you how to turn a basic application into a web service. By following the principles explained in this chapter, you should be able to implement the remaining Items.update and Items.delete actions.

You saw how to generate an empty Play application skeleton using activator. Then, you saw how to define the mapping between HTTP endpoints and your application entry points and the different ways you can bind your controller action parameters from the request URL. You saw how to build HTTP responses and the mechanism used by Play to infer the right response content type. Finally, you saw how to serve JSON responses and how to read and validate JSON requests.

In the next chapter, you will replace the in-memory storage system with a persistent storage system, and you will see how your Play application can be integrated with existing persistence technologies like JDBC.