It aims to optimize developer productivity by using convention over configuration, hot code reloading and display of errors in the browser.

Play was created by software developer Guillaume Bort, while working at Zengularity SA (formerly Zenexity).

[7] Play is heavily inspired by ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails and Django and is similar to this family of frameworks.

In August 2011, Heroku announced native support for Play applications on its cloud computing platform.

[28] Corporate users of the Play Framework have included Coursera, HuffPost, Hootsuite, Janrain, LinkedIn, and Connectifier.