Play! Framework Hackaton

Zauber team working

Zauber Software encourages employees to research new technologies in order to perform better and improve ourselves each day. So as to do this, we have Hackatons very often at Zauber in which we investigate different technologies .

In one of this Hackatons, we decided to test Play! Framework. The Play framework’s goal is to ease web applications development while sticking with Java. Its idea is pretty similar to Rails's idea.

We thought that the best way to test the framework would be creating an application that we'd use here at Zauber every day. In that moment, we started thinking about "A comerla!".

Everyday we call a lot of restaurants in order to have our meal delivered to the office. Right now, It's very complicated for us to know how much each meal costs, which is the total of the order, who's going to call the restaurant, who's going to collect the money to pay and when the order will be placed. "A Comerla" is the solution to this and the excuse to try Play!.

We also tried several Play! modules with this app. We used the recent developed Secure Social module for the Google Login. We also used Greenscript module minify the CSS and JS, to create dependencies between the JS files and to be able to use less files, among other things. In order to make the app more beautiful we used Twitter Bootstrap which makes it easy to style any web site. Furthermore, We heard that Heroku had native support for Play! Framework, so we decided to upload it there. You may see the app deployed at http://a-comerla.herokuapp.com/

We've open sourced the application so that anyone can access it. The url for the Github repository is https://github.com/zauberlabs/a-comerla. There, you'll find the instructions on how to deploy this in your own business. 

It was a really great experience and it's an awesome framework. We'll continue to test new technologies and post them here in the future.