What do you think of Play? I just started looking into it and it seems pretty painless for basic stuff.

It is. If you're looking for a web framework with statically typed language and don't want to deal with this monstrosity they call spring then Play has little competition. While basic stuff is easy, you can do more than just basic stuff since it's a full featured web framework. Some benchmarks: https://gist.github.com/schmitch/2ca3359bc34560c6063d0b00eb0...