Last week a new Play framework discussion group was announced on Google Groups. There is already a play-framework group - the new play-framework-tr group is in Turkish. It turns out that there have also been attempts to start groups in other languages: playframework-cn (Chinese), play-ja (Japanese) and ru-play-framework (Russian).

Update: since this article was published, a play-latam (Latin-America) group has started as well.

None of these groups is really active yet, but this is certainly the start of the Play framework community’s next growth spurt. This happens when a single language group contains a critical mass of developers that can support a developer community in that language, which then enables developers who are less comfortable asking questions in English to participate. Any developer community that successfully makes this transition can then grow rapidly, as the community grows enough to establish a market for its own conferences, documentation translations, books and ultimately jobs.

The Play framework community is still in the initial global phase, and it is early days for the Chinese-, Japanese-, Turkish- and Russian-language communities. In any case, it is exciting to see Play well on the way to world-domination.

Peter Hilton is a senior software developer at Lunatech Research and committer on the Play open-source project.

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