title: How to store object (not string) in session in play framework?
body: <p>I have a project for school and I have to use Java. Recently I found play framework and I want to try to use it. It's easy enough for a quick start, but I ran into a problem with session.</p>
  
  <p>Being stateless by its nature, play sends entire session to user in cookie and receives it on next request, so it allows only limited amount of data in session.</p>
  
  <p>What I want to do is to fetch User object from DB on user login, and keep it in session, so I could access it from templates and so on (I have some methods in User class that I need to call in order to customize UI), but if I put User object, play calls its toString method and puts that in session.</p>
  
  <p>I found that recommended way is to put larger amount of data into Cache, but I don't know how to access it from template (I guess I could make method with @Before annotation and add user to renderArgs, but that does not seem very clean to me). Another problem is that Cache has limited lifetime, so my object can disappear.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone has experience with this kind of problems?</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to use server side session with play? I don't need REST functionality for this project, so, as far as I am concerned, application can save state... </p>