The play framework is a web action-based framework that allows you to create web applications in fast and simple way. The play framework can start fast and reload your java classes in a fast way without restarting your application. Play focuses on developer productivity and targets RESTful architectures. Play doesn’t use a java webserver to start the application so the webserver starts up fast, but it does use many standard java libraries, like jpa with hibernate. Another nice feature of play is that you can start it up in test mode and then you have an embedded selenium test available to you.
Models
You can use existing jpa entities or create new ones extending from the Model that play provides. Extending this base class will get you an id and a number of find methods that can be used as static methods.
The properties are set as public fields in these model classes. This looks like a no-no to any experienced java developer, but if you think about it a bit more, this may not be such an awfull thing. Most models that I have seen are nothing more then a bunch of getters and setters for some properties. So why not make them public. The play framework will create the getters and setters and will use them, however this is done at run time.