Why does setting up a project with play take so much time ?

Question

I am trying to use play framework to make a simple hello world web application. After downloading, it I have used activator new helloworld to create a simple project named helloworld and to run it I am using activator run .

Now, the activator is taking a lot of time to run. It is downloading a lot of jar files from a very long time.
I want to know, why does it download so many jar files for the project ? Will it download those jar files before running every new project ?

Answer 1

Activator is the soft wrapper for sbt. Sbt is the build tool that play use.

When you create the project activator new - it download (and create) the project "template" files.

When you run activator run sbt check your configuration and download dependencies. It's smart, so it will not download dependencies every run - it will update it only if you change it.

Look at this question and my answer: PlayFramework resolves dependencies every launch