Have you taken a look at another Java-based framework www.scooterframework.com? All your experiences in Rails can be found there: ActiveRecord, associations, routes, named sql queries, i18n, ajax, etc. I particularly like the one-click routes link. I think Scooter's routes which is based on Rails is much better. Also I like Scooter's ActiveRecord over Play's JPA. I just cannot tolerate annotations polluting my Java class everywhere.