play1.x with scala was quite experimental (play2 is really different and robustly designed) and those benchmarks always generate trolls... Anyway, I can't make people change their mind about those points even if I had numbers to show because everyone sees what he wants to see. This is just subjectivity ;)
typesafety+compiled brings a robustness and sureness (and sometimes performance) that dynamic languages can't really provide. Dynamic languages are interesting in some domains also... I must admit I'm a big fan of static typed language since the beginning so I'm not really objective ;)
You're welcome!
The idea is to simplify writing basic Reads/Writes for simple Scala structures. In this way, you can focus on writing more complex JSON validation/transformation when you need it... For JSON coast-to-coast design that I introduced in previous article, this is quite useful!
And Play2 core is composed of very robust components without any runtime enhancement, any magic. Using Scala power, we can build very clean tools, such as this one, without perverting typesafe/fully-compiled basements.
This new driver mixed with Play2 fully non-blocking/asynchronous stack opens very interesting fields of exploration and was really something missing till now in JVM world...