This week in #Scala (13/01/2012)

Welcome to another week in @Scala. It’s been a busy week so lets get started:

New Stuff

Equinox Weaving Launcher is now available. This is an Eclipse component which adds a new launch configuration type allowing Eclipse Applications and JUnit plug-in tests to be launched with Equinox Weaving enabled. It was developed to simplify the development workflow for the Scala IDE for Eclipse, and it can be used to support development of other Eclipse applications which use Equinox Weaving.

AKKA 1.3-RC6 is the latest release candidate for the upcoming AKKA 1.3. Check the link for further details.

sbt-git-plugin 0.4 - a SBT plugin that enabled cross-platform GIT support.

groll 1.1.1  and 1.1.0 were released this week. Groll is a plugin for sbt to view and navigate through the Git history.

Scalding is now open source. Scalding is a Scala API for Cascading – a thin Java library and API that sits on top of Apache Hadoop’s MapReduce layer.

Lift 2.4 Final is out now! This version of the web framework adds plenty of new features and improvements:

• Lots of enhancements to JSON support
• Record improvments
• Squeryl/Record support for Crudify
• Singificant enhancement to MongoDB support (including better support for reference records and binary fields)
• Support for BsonDSL (BSON types to JsonDSL)
• Significant enhancements to Mailer functionality
• Significant enhancements to the CSS Selector transformers
• Enhancements to Snippet resolution like sub-packages based resolution, Loc-based snippet resolution of Screen and Wizard, etc.
• Significant improvement to REST support including stateless Async/Continuations on Jetty 7, Jetty 8 and Tomcat/Glassfish
• Ability to get html5 compliant templates using data-lift attribute
• Numerous localization modules

For more information follow the link .

Blogs and tutorials

• Even simpler scalability with Akka through RegistryActor by vasil Remeniuk (@remeniuk)
• Make Tests Clean and Clear Without Duplication by David Bryant Copeland (@davetron5000)
• Graham Lea has updated his Scala/Spring/Hibernate/Maven Webapp
• more on implicit parameter precedence by eed3si9n (@eed3si9n)
• Simple but useful blog on the Evolution of a typical Scala programmer by Rahul Goma Phulore (@missingfaktor)
• Heiko Seeberger (@hseeberger) updated his Akka samples to Akka 2.0!
• Another blog about the Scala language and its complexity - True Scala complexity by Yang Zhang (@yaaang)
• Daniel Sobral (@dcsobral) responds to Yang in his blog - Adding methods to scala collections
• Martin Odersky (@odersky) also responds to Yang
• Marc-Daniel Ortega (@patterngazer) posted a blog about monads
• Scala Community Awards by Josh Suereth (@jsuereth)
• Alex Blewitt (@alblue) talks to Iulian Dragos (@jaguarul) about Scala IDE 2.0
• A suggestion to reduce the learning curve of Scala – Scala needs terraces by Dhananjay Nen (@dnene)
• Josh Suereth (@jsuereth) talks about SBT in his SBT Cookbook presentation
• Checkout this follow up to an earlier post describing how to create a simple scala script to keep track of translated files. The new post compares scala, bash and python.

As usual feel free to drop me a mail or message @markglh on twitter with any Scala news!