Why is the play framework not built on top of the Servlet API?

I started pl开发者_开发问答aying with the playframework recently and really enjoy the simplicity.

But one nagging question I've had is why it eschews the servlet specification all together? What was the main motivation behind such an architectural decision?

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From the FAQ

We are fully aware that we made choices that are pretty uncommon in the Java world, and that Play does not blindly follow all the so-called Java ‘good practices’. But all of the Play team members are very experienced Java developers and we are totally aware of the choices we made and the rules we broke.

Java itself is a very generic programming language and not originally designed for web application development. It is a very different thing to write a generic and reusable Java library and to create a web application. A web application itself doesn’t need to be designed to be reusable. You need less abstraction, less configuration. Reusability does exist for web applications, but through web service APIs rather than language-level integration.

When the development time tends to zero you can concentrate on your application features and experiment quickly, instead of trying to abstract things for future developments.

Play! applications can be deployed as web application on other web server containers, but it is mainly designed as a full stack framework; Play is the platform. And, in my opinion, this is what makes it beautiful and fast.