Note: this is a somewhat advanced topic, most users safely can ignore this

While one can really take advantage of most play features while building a full application from scratch using play, it's very easy to drop play into existing sbt/maven projects and with just a little work use it as a REST/HTTP library. Below you can see how to do that.

A Global object extending GlobalSettings in the global name space is the key wiring point. GlobalSettings has a method def onRouteRequest(request: RequestHeader): Option[Handler] that's handling play's routing.

One could easily provide an alternative implementation and start using play as a REST library!

See this for an example.