The Play Framework is probably one of the few web frameworks that installs and works pretty well on Windows. I started web development with Django, but I had to learn Python and Django at the same time, and the documentation was not so good as they said it was. So I decided to leverage my Java experience and use Play. And since Play supports both Java and Scala I could refactor and move to Scala at any time.

On this guide I’ll just refer to these variables and not their absolute paths:
%JAVA_HOME%
, where Java installer installs JDK, e.g.C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.7.0_25\bin
%PLAY_HOME%
, where you extract the Play! Framework files, e.g.C:\Play\play-2.1.2
To install Play just follow these steps:
- First, you should follow the default steps from the official guide.
- Uninstall previous JDK. Download and install the most recent JDK. Don’t forget to (1) create a
%JAVA_HOME%
system variable and (2) append that variable to yourPATH
environment variable. - Extract the Play! Framework install package (zip) to
%PLAY_HOME%
. Attention: you must have read and write permissions on that folder. - Open a command line, go to
%PLAY_HOME%
, typeplay
and enter. That should start the Play! installer. Wait for the installation to finish. Don’t forget to add%PLAY_HOME%
to yourPATH
environment variable. - To test if everything is ok, open a command line, then execute
java -version
, thenjavac -version
, thenplay help
. Check the outputs of each command and you’ll know if it worked.