Play! framework uses a <lot> of statics

 

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. Is that somehow okay? If so, why?

We (7 people and I) are planning to use the Play! framework for a project involving a web app. We decided to do it with Play! because it looks quite fun to do, all of us already know Java and the assignment is pretty hard so we wanted to focus on the actual assignment rather than also learning how to program in a different language.

We were always told, however, NEVER EVER to use 'static's in any Java program we developed, but when I look at Play! ... Well... about half the methods are static. </exaggeration>

I suppose, at the very least, we could use singleton objects (by using Scala, for example ^^) in order to program our project, but I'm quite concerned at how many statics there actually are in framework itself.

So, should I be concerned about this? Did the way the Play! developers programmed it make it so that all these statics don't pose a problem?

(For example, this thread has a rant about why static members should be avoided at all costs.)

Play uses static methods only when it makes sense:

  • in the controller layer, because controllers are not object oriented. Controllers act as mapper between the HTTP world (that is stateless, and request/response based) and the Model layer that is fully object oriented.
  • in the model layer for factory methods, like findAll(), count(), create() which of course don't depend of any particular instances
  • in some play.libs.* classes that provides purely utility functions

    • Play framework is not a good demonstration of when using statics is appropriate, nor it proves that your teacher was wrong. Play is kind of cheating, solves the issues of statics outside the Java language.

    The key problem is that you have to process multiple HTTP requests in parallel, and static fields are "global". So you will need one instance per thread (or even better, one instance per HTTP request) for certain things, yet some of those things are returned by static methods in Play. That works because Play! uses ThreadLocal -s heavily, and so it solves a problem of statics outside the Java language. But that's not everything. Some say that controller methods are rightfully static. Sure, but in plain Java it would be inconvenient, as then you can't access request-specific data without some kind of prefix, like req. in req.session , and then you still have to get req from somewhere, like as a parameter of the static controller method, which is even more hassle. Yet in Play you can you just directly write session and like, they are just static fields. That's because Play uses bytecode instrumentation to change all those static field references to something smarter. Again, a solution outside the Java language. Those are not static fields at the end.

    So, in general, avoid non-final statics. Play does the magic for you though, so don't afraid of them in this case.

    From a very brief look, I'd say it kind of makes sense: web requests are stateless, so there is no object to receive the request (=the method). Thus, mapping an URI such as "/articles/archive?date=08/01/08&page=2" to a static method called archive() on, I guess, your application class makes sense.

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