Comments on: Observations on the Play! framework

By: Ashish

Ashish — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:09:00 +0000

I am fairly new to Play, but seems very difficult to do DI. I am not able to get the confidence in doing TDD in Play

By: David Hesson

David Hesson — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 20:16:00 +0000

Has this changed much at all in Play? My suspicions after toying with Play 2.0 this morning were that testing was going to be annoying, especially isolation unit tests that I want to run fast, without services running. Seems like this post confirms my fears. I also see plenty of stack overflow posts mentioning that DI is unnecessary in Play but I think people forget that well laid out services/controllers rely on interfaces and class composition to perform work, which invites DI and makes it easier to unit test this code as well as configure your application.

By: Samario

Samario — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:52:00 +0000

Hello James,

Five years ago you shared this knowledge <>, I don´t know how to implemented it, Can you please share a complete implementation, that is to say, a little visual studio project using the code. I will be gratefull for your help. Thansk. Henry.-

My email is : samario@gmail.com.

By: Royston Shufflebotham

Royston Shufflebotham — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:08:00 +0000

I’ve always subscribed to the notion that a framework API shouldn’t be considered as having ‘survived contact with the enemy’ until not only has somebody written something using your API, but that they have also written tests against their code.

I’ve just started getting into Play, having previously used ASP.NET MVC and Rails, and having spent the last few years doing constructor-based injection testing, it’s bit of a disappointment testing-wise. Didn’t they learn from the static unmockable HttpContent fiasco in ASP.NET? *sigh*

But maybe it’s not a ‘deal breaker’ – can we make it work anyway?

Controller action methods are meant to be extremely lightweight, and generally you want to get out of those and into services, repositories, other (non-REST) ‘controller’ objects as quickly as possible. Those can all be developed using proper instances with constructor injection and all the usual good stuff, no?

Play introduces its own ‘FunctionalTest’ and ‘UnitTest’ base classes, but you don’t have to use them: you can write your own (fast) plain JUnit tests as long as the code you’re testing doesn’t make heavy use of Play stuff, which is probably in the database level. But then you’re straying out of unit tests and into more integration-y tests, perhaps? The biggest area of irritation there is all the static fields inherited from Controller, e.g. ‘validation’.

I dunno. I like the feel of the framework (apart from the curious static methods everywhere) and so I _want_ it to work. But when I see the great work that’s been going on in ASP.NET MVC, where they’ve made it really easy to use out-of-the-box yet have made everything completely pluggable and testable, Play seems a bit backward.

I’m going to give it a try and see if I can bend it to my DI+unit testing will. If not, I’m dumping it. But what’s the alternative in Java land?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:03:00 +0000

Hi Ryan, you are correct. I do actually do this, though re-reading what I wrote I can see how that’s not very clear. My real complaint is that whilst you can run them in your IDE, they require the full web stack to be available before they’ll execute; this basically means you get a minimum of a 5s overhead for running your tests. Five seconds doesn’t sound like much, I admit, but it quickly gets frustrating when you’re used to a fast cycle.

Like many things in Play, I can live with it, and I can appreciate their decisions; however, it would be nice to not *have* to do it their way. I get the feeling Play! is at the place where Rails was a few years ago.

Phase 1: “You WILL do it our way!”
Phase 2: “Ok, you SHOULD do it our way but you can deviate a bit”
Phase 3: “Our way is the default, do whatever the hell you want though.”

By: Ryan Svihla

Ryan Svihla — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:21:00 +0000

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in the Java space but I seem to remember being able to run tests through Intellij when using the play “idealize” command see the following link

http://www.playframework.org/documentation/1.2.3/ide