§What’s new in Play 2.8
This page highlights the new features of Play 2.8. If you want to learn about the changes you need to make when you migrate to Play 2.8, check out the Play 2.8 Migration Guide.
§Akka 2.6
Play 2.8 brings the latest minor version of Akka. Although Akka 2.6 is binary compatible with 2.5, there are changes in the default configurations and some deprecated features were removed. You can see more details about the changes in Akka 2.6 migration guide.
§Akka Typed
§Cluster Sharding for Akka Typed
Play 2.8 provides dependency injection support for Akka Cluster Sharding Typed, allowing users to inject a ClusterSharding instance and start sharded typed actors across an Akka Cluster.
§Jackson ObjectMapper configuration
Instead of providing its way to create and configure an ObjectMapper, which before Play 2.8 requires the user to write a custom binding if some customization is required, Play now uses Akka Jackson support to provide an ObjectMapper. It means that it is now possible to add Jackson Modules and configure Features using application.conf. For example, if you want to add Joda support, you just need to add the following configuration:
akka.serialization.jackson.jackson-modules += "com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype.joda.JodaModule"
And if you need to write numbers as strings, add the following configuration:
akka.serialization.jackson.serialization-features.WRITE_NUMBERS_AS_STRINGS=true
§Guice support for Akka Actor Typed
The pre-existing AkkaGuiceSupport utility, which helped bind Akka’s “classic” actors, has gained additional methods to support Akka 2.6’s new Typed Actor API.
Here’s a quick example, in Scala, of defining a Guice module which binds a HelloActor:
object AppModule extends AbstractModule with AkkaGuiceSupport {
override def configure() = {
bindTypedActor(HelloActor(), "hello-actor")
}
}
And again, in Java, where the actor extends Akka’s Java DSL AbstractBehavior:
public final class AppModule extends AbstractModule
implements AkkaGuiceSupport {
@Override
protected void configure() {
bindTypedActor(HelloActor.class, "hello-actor");
}
}
See Integrating with Akka Typed for more details.
§Other additions
§Build additions
When adding Akka moodules to your application, it is important that you use a consistent version of Akka for all the modules since mixed versioning is not allowed. To make it easier, play.core.PlayVersion object now adds akkaVersion so that you can use it in your builds like:
import play.core.PlayVersion.akkaVersion
libraryDependencies += "com.typesafe.akka" %% "akka-cluster" % akkaVersion
§Lang cookie max age configuration
It is now possible to configure a max age for language cookie. To do that, add the following to your application.conf:
play.i18n.langCookieMaxAge = 15 seconds
By the default, the configuration is null meaning no max age will be set for Lang cookie.
§Threshold for the gzip filter
If you have the gzip filter enabled you can now also set a byte threshold via application.conf to control which responses are and aren’t gzipped based on their body size:
play.filters.gzip.threshold = 1k
Responses whose body size are equal or lower than the given byte threshold won’t be compressed, because it’s assumed, when gzipped, they end up being bigger than the original body.
If the body size cannot be determined (e.g. chunked responses), then it is assumed the response is over the threshold.
By default the threshold is set to 0 to compress all responses, no matter how large the response body size is.
Please see the gzip filter page for more details.
Next: Migration Guides