Question

I’m working on learning JSP and the Play framework, and I understand that it runs on Scala and renders views based on templates, but what if I just want to use plain HTML rather than scala templates?

The situation I’m in is that I’m designing the site to match a visual template, so I’m using Dreamweaver to build the html files. I really like Play framework though, so I’d like to continue using it. So, what are my options here?

Answer 1

I don’t get. Play’s views are not just nice html files, of course you can (or even should) use your favorite tools for design part, anyway you have to also learn how to include a dynamic parts in it.

Of course you can use DreamWeaver for that task as it has feature for editing source code. But I can ensure you from my own experience, that there are better tools for every-day work with Play’s views than DW.

You can also use plain HTML in your /public folder however in this scenario you won’t be able to make it dynamic, so it has no sense, as you can create the pages without any framework – just using static files created with DW.

In general words: you need to verify your needs, cause from your question I read: “I like Play framework, anyway I don’t want to use it for its job…”

After-comments edit:

You don’t have to make views dynamic. If you won’t pass any arguments into the view and will put there pure HTML it will be ‘relatively cheap‘ way for displaying static pages as well. Just you need to remeber to leave first line of the file empty. So you don’t need to use File index = new File... instead just put your bare HTML code into ie: app/views/staticContact.scala.html and then use an action:

public static Result staticContact(){
    return ok(views.html.staticContact.render());
}

On the quite other hand, last time I was wondering if it wasn’t better to put HTML code of the static pages into the DB, in such case you could create an editing page, where you could change HTML without redeploying the application. All what you will need it was just fetching HTML from DB and displaying it in one generic view. For better performance you can use included Cache implementation.