Play! framework uses a of statics

Question

Waaah, the Play! framework has so many static methods. Where I go to school, we were told never ever to use any statics, yet Play! uses it like there's no tomorrow. Is that somehow okay? If so, why?

We (7 people and I) are planning to use the Play! framework for a project involving a web app. We decided to do it with Play! because it looks quite fun to do, all of us already know Java and the assignment is pretty hard so we wanted to focus on the actual assignment rather than also learning how to program in a different language.

We were always told, however, NEVER EVER to use 'static's in any Java program we developed, but when I look at Play! ... Well... about half the methods are static. </exaggeration>

I suppose, at the very least, we could use singleton objects (by using Scala, for example ^^) in order to program our project, but I'm quite concerned at how many statics there actually are in framework itself.

So, should I be concerned about this? Did the way the Play! developers programmed it make it so that all these statics don't pose a problem?

(For example, this thread has a rant about why static members should be avoided at all costs.)

Answer 1

The main problem is that static methods only have access to other static methods and fields, which results in 'static cling' whereby the static methods have to rendezvous with the rest of the application (which contains its collaborators) via common static field(s), which leads to inflexibility.

Disclaimer: I don't know much about 'play!'

Answer 2

From a very brief look, I'd say it kind of makes sense: web requests are stateless, so there is no object to receive the request (=the method). Thus, mapping an URI such as "/articles/archive?date=08/01/08&page=2" to a static method called archive() on, I guess, your application class makes sense.