You guys are trying to invent Playframework V1 😁 It's a Ruby-on Rails/Grails-like Java web framework. It's got a bunch of convention over configuration stuff like this. E.g., if you follow the convention of naming your controller and the folder that contains the view templates for it the same.. and also name the controller action methods the same as the view templates themselves, then you only have to call

render()

at the end of a controller action and Play will figure out automagically which template to render. It even comes with auto content negotiation out the box , so you can have a the exact same controller action method render

view.html

or

view.json

or

view.xml

etc. automagically, based on the content-type header in the request. It's because of stuff like this that we are still using V1 of the Playframework, because it just makes you so ridiculously productive in building web apps. Intercooler.js and then later htmx + hyperscript was the missing piece to the puzzle to make the UI SPA-like and make it nearly as productive as doing stuff server-side

Lol. I was just doing some Java the other day for the first time in… 18 years?

That was a mail server though. Could quite bend it to my will so I switched to postfix and friends.

I shall have a look at Play though

i miss java

and I'm tired of pretending I don't

Do we need hyperscript on the server now?

my main experience with java is generic array creation and trying to wrangle collections/iterables/streams

hyperscript on hails

Sweet! We're pretty baked into the Java ecosystem, so finding a great web framework for it was fantastic. I have to admit though, the creators of the Play framework got impatient a few years ago with the slow progress of the Java language, so they created Playframework V2, which is Scala-based and unfortunately lost a lot of the lightweight-ness and magic of V1. If only they had waited a little longer for the later versions of Java, which introduced many of the functional concepts they were craving, the world would have been a better place for us Java web developers 🙂

The kinda-standard Java web framework answer nowadays is Spring Boot. While the core Spring framework remains great to this day, I just never could get into Spring Boot... too much generated stuff in there

Don’t suppose Play does fancy things like SSE or websockets? That sort of thing feels tricky to map to an FS

Play 1 has got sweet web socket support out the box. Not SSE though afaik

java is a great JVM with a mediocre language on top of it, and a very bad culture of over engineering, but when you find libraries that are built correctly it can be great

the only thing that really makes me furious about java is the fact that full hotswap has not been integrated into the default JVM

so you have to restart when you cahnge method signatures, etc.

insane

I'm not seriously suggesting anyone start a new project with Playframework V1 though... community support for it has dropped very low, although luckily there are still a few core maintainers which regularly update its core dependencies, makes it work with the latest versions of Java etc .... but Play2 (which is really a completely different beast) is where it's probably at for new stuff.

full hotswap tech has been available for over a decade, the guy who demoed it a the JVM language conference works for oracle and it still isn't in the JVM

I need to capture that story somewhere permanent

it really is unbelievable and a testament to how much human factors end up affecting how technology develoeps

Ah! With Play1 they baked hot class reloading right in, so it's a matter of making a Java change, hit Save, switch to the browser and hit reload. Feels like you're working in any of the dynamic language frameworks really. It's only when debugging that method signature changes breaks the debugger and you have restart the debugging session

yes

2011

Thomas gave this presentation at the JVM Language Summit or whatever it was called

full hotswap

At the time coming from building enterprise monstrosities in IBM Websphere based J2EE bloat-monsters, where making a single line changing meant multi-minute waits for the server to restart before you can see you change live, Play was phenomenal 😅

make a change, any change, hit refresh, boom

full debugging, whatever