This week in #Scala (18/05/2012)

Welcome to another week in #Scala. It’s been little quieter than it has in previous weeks, however we’ve still plenty of juicy Scala morsels for you to devour!

New Stuff

Aptly named, play2-war-plugin v0.3.1 has been released to help package your Play apps into standard WAR packages.

Scalatra 2.1.0.M2, the tiny, Sinatra-like web framework for Scala, has been released.

Maker, a build tool focussing on putting the Simple back into build tools has been released.

Shapeless 1.2.2 has a number of improvements, a fair few related to HList.

A couple of bugs have been fixed in Specs2 1.10 and a good number of new features thrown in for good measure!

For double eyebrow-arching surprises, check out  Scala Puzzlers.

Rob Dickens has now packaged and added to Maven Central his EitherExtras helper class (for doing validation without Scalaz).

-target:jvm-1.6 is now supported by scalac.

Blogs and tutorials

• APIs for Akka applications. Jan Machacek (@honzam399) hakks a little more, this time enlightening us on API structure along with providing both the HTTP REST API and websocket exposure
• Running Standalone Web Applications on Cloud Foundry: Deploying a Spray Application to Cloud Foundry by Jennifer Hickey (@jencompgeek)
• Processing JSON in Scala with Jerkson by Jason Baldridge (@jasonbaldridge)
• Exploring invokedynamic to avoid boxing/unboxing and make closures run faster by Miguel Garcia
• Stackless Scala with Free Monads by Runar Oli Bjarnason (@runarorama)
• Box Cheat Sheet for Lift by Kelsey Innis (@kelseyinnis)
• HTML5: Remotely vibrate a phone with morse code using web sockets and the vibrate API by Jos Dirksen (@josdirksen)
• Scala shell scripts and the command line: Prompting the user, and reading input by Alvin Alexander (@alvinalexander)

Enjoy your Scala filled weekend! And as always, feel free to drop myself or Mark a mail or message us on twitter (@AmarettoAndCode or @markglh) with any Scala news!