It's true. I just found out about this today, since my company uses the play
framework and someone ran into it.
As I understand it, this likely only occurs in play
versions prior to 2.0, but when you catch all Exceptions following a render call, play
apparently rewrites the code to skip the finally
block...
I don't understand why or exactly how this is done, but it is apparently the case.
If you catch a specific exception, I don't think this will happen.
But yes, you're not crazy or a bad programmer. This really is just a weird, undocumented play
gotcha.