experience with play! framework big applications maintainability

Question

Play! framework really lets you get up and running quickly, but I wonder how hard it gets to maintain applications once they start to grow in size and complexity...

anyone knows of some middle to big size play application on production, and how hard or easy has it been to support, maintain and improve it?

Answer 1

Re-post from play google group in case it interests anyone:
Just a remark, not a serious answer:
This is typically the kind of biased questions I love when trying to convince people of using a new technology :)
Almost impossible to answer this with serious arguments and without being very subjective... Moreover, it really depends on the subject, the enterprise context, the skills of the people etc...
Finally, from my experience, the technology itself is almost never the main problem when a project fails or is difficult to maintain: it's generally the way this technology has been used by developers/architects and how the project has been designed and documented. You can find very well designed projects in the worst technology.
Nevertheless, if the frameworks used are complicated and require too long learning curves and expert skills, it can multiply the complexity and not just increase it a bit.

Answer 2

The "rail" in RoR and Grails, and anything other convention over coding framework, means that they constrain your choices for the sake of getting you to the goal more quickly. In this case, the goal is a CRUD web-based application.

If your future changes remain within the constraints laid down by the framework you won't have any problem. If you decide that you want to branch out from that you'll have a problem.

The answers you get to this question will depend on that fact. There won't be a single, comforting, one size fits all response that will remove all risk from your decision.