I loved PlayFramework v1.x because it was simple, clear and expressive. It brought us a completely different experience in web development with Java. However I don't totally agree with where Play 2.X is heading. I had thought of rolling out something that could follow the road paved by Play 1.x; something that is simple, clear, expressive and developer friendly. In short, we need a modern, sleek Java MVC framework which we don't get from Spring MVC, Sprint Boot, PlayFramework, SparkFramework or any others on the market
Act is not a servlet framework and Act application does not run in a Servlet container
Act.Framework supports hot-reload applications and it takes less than a second to reload your normal sized app According to this benchmark project, Act.Framework is 20 times faster than Spring boot in simple cases.
Fully JSR 330 support and even more
Act.Framework supports the concept of profile which allows you to organize your configurations in different environment (defined by profile) easily.
Act.Framework provides a decent set of database access APIs via act.db.Dao and relevant interfaces. (act-ebean, act-morphia)
Act.Framework by default uses the Rythm Template Engine. Act.Framework support using multiple template - like velocity, mustache.. - engines in the same projects.