You are viewing the documentation for the 2.4.0-M3 development release. The latest stable release series is 3.0.x.

§What’s new in Play 2.4

This page highlights the new features of Play 2.4. If you want learn about the changes you need to make to migrate to Play 2.4, check out the Play 2.4 Migration Guide.

§Dependency Injection

TODO(jroper)

§Embeddable Router

§Logging enhancements

TODO(jroper): jroper made some good changes here with better support for logback
Log messages generated by Play can now be configured on a per-class basis as opposed to previously needing to change the log level for all Play log messages.

§Java 8 support

JSON handling now supports Java 8 temporal values such as Instant, LocalDateTime, and LocalDate.
The Play documentation now shows code examples using Java 8 syntax for callables. As an example, here’s how some code has changed.

Before:

return promise(new Function0<Integer>() {
  public Integer apply() {
    return longComputation();
  }
}).map(new Function<Integer,Result>() {
  public Result apply(Integer i) {
    return ok("Got " + i);
  }
});

After:

return promise(() -> longComputation())
    .map((Integer i) -> ok("Got " + i));

§Java Testing

A new RequestBuilder replaces FakeRequest and RequestBuilder will build a request that is actually a Request. FakeRequest was not a Request which meant it was not interopable with many of the Play APIs. This improvement makes it much easier to instantiate a controller and call a method on it during testing.

§Maven/SBT standard layout

Play will now let you use either its default layout or the directory layout that is the default for Maven and SBT projects. See the Anatomy of a Play application page for more details.

§Anorm

New positional getter on Row.
Unified column resolution by label, whatever it is (name or alias).
New streaming API; Functions fold and foldWhile to work with result stream (e.g. SQL"Select count(*) as c from Country".fold(0l) { (c, _) => c + 1 }). Function withResult to provide custom stream parser (e.g. SQL("Select name from Books").withResult(customTailrecParser(_, List.empty[String]))).
Supports array (java.sql.Array) from column (e.g. SQL("SELECT str_arr FROM tbl").as(scalar[Array[String]].*)) or as parameter (e.g. SQL"""UPDATE Test SET langs = ${Array("fr", "en", "ja")}""".execute()).
Improved conversions for numeric and boolean columns.
New conversions for binary columns (bytes, stream, blob), to parsed them as Array[Byte] or InputStream.
New conversions for Joda Instant or DateTime, from Long, Date or Timestamp column.
Added conversions to support List[T], Set[T], SortedSet[T], Stream[T] and Vector[T] as multi-value parameter.
New conversion to parse text column as UUID (e.g. SQL("SELECT uuid_as_text").as(scalar[java.util.UUID].single)).

Next: What's new in Play 2.3?