Play! framework uses a of statics

Question

Waaah, the Play! framework has so many static methods. Where I go to school, we were told never ever to use any statics, yet Play! uses it like there\'s no tomorrow

Answer 1

Static controller methods are certainly an area of concern with the Play! framework, and after having done some testing, it is the main reason for me not doing Play! in projects. You can actually see this where in FOSS projects where Play! is used. There is little or no Controller testing. The reason, with static methods, DI becomes difficult. This is where they should have spent even more time with ASP.NET MVC, from where Play! already takes a bit of inspiration.

Typically you have a constructor like this:

public HomeController( IService service ) {
   _service = service;
}
public Index() {
   var data = _service.getData();
   return View( data );
}

Then you use DI to inject the IService implementation into the Controller. The point being that in your tests, you can instantiate the IService just prior to running the Controller, and then test the result based on the IService you just produced.

In Play this becomes very hard. Thus Controller unit testing becomes hard. That is, to me, a significant problem. I would therefore tend to look for other frameworks than Play! in the Java world. Heck, why not go with the original and just use JRuby?