Welcome to another edition of ‘This week in Scala’! I have a bumper issue for you; there’s been lots happening in the Scala world.
Firstly though, it wouldn’t be right to continue without mentioning the excellent Coursera Scala class which reaches it’s conclusion this coming week. The final deadline is looming and certificates are waiting in the wings for some of the 50K+ students that took part. If you are itching to keep on learning, then I recommend checking out the Scala Koans project. If you’re not already aware, Koans is a Japanese term and has been adopted in programming to essentially mean broken unit tests. I’ll let you figure out the rest about this learning approach. 
Now, enjoy your Scala reading list…
New Stuff
- Akka 2.0.4 has been released
- Lift 2.5-M3 is out
- specs2 1.12.3 is now available which includes support for describing expectations and converting Hamcrest matchers to Specs2 matchers
- ReactiveMongo has been updated with support for Scala 2.10RC2 and Aakka 2.1
- The Play framework plugin has been updated too
- The Play framework plugin has been updated too
- Scoobi 0.6.0-RC1 with better Avro support and a fast in-memory mode
- Work is underway in the IntelliJ Scala plugin to use Zinc / SBT in an external incremental JPS compiler
- First there was SBT, and now there’s ABT – The Alternative Build Tool
- Typesafe shared a case study on Akka’s use at Abiquo
Old Stuff
This week I steer away from “beginners” content to offer something a little more advanced from the Scalaz library:
Upcoming Events
- 19/11/2012 to 20/11/2012 - Scala eXchange 2012 with Skills Matter, London, UK <- I’ll be there!
- 29/11/2012 – Vienna Scala User Group, Vienna, Austria <- A new group!
- 03/12/2012 – Scala & LiftWeb for Web Development, Skills Matter, London, UK
Blogs & Tutorials
- Jonas Boner’s presentation on “Scaling Software with Akka” at Strange Loop 2012 was posted on InfoQ (video and slides)
- Alexander Lehmann e-mailed me about his post on “Saddling the horse with type-classes in Scala“
- Alvin Alexander posted two videos (useful for beginners only):
- Daniel Pecos shared his thoughts on the Coursera Scala class
- @honzam399 shared a post about two-phase authentication when sending text messages in Scala with Akka and Spray
- He was still in the blogging mood a day later and wrote “Purity and dirty secrets“
- Tomasz Nurkiewicz seems to have *mostly* recovered from the blogging flu which led him to write three posts last week. This week he only wrote one:
- Krishna Prasad blogged again: ScalaTest a MapReduce using Akka
- Chip Collier blogged for the first time: Akka, AMQP, Play and Scala (A follow up)
- Benchmarking JVM Concurrency Options for Java, Scala and Akka
- The Akka team continued their 2.1 Spotlight series:
- James Roper followed up his popular “Benchmarking Scala against Java” post with “Scaling Scala vs Java“
- Greg Turnquist shared his prezi ”Financial Data with Scala” <- certainly nicer than looking at static slides!
- Tommy Chheng wrote a roundup of “Basic Scala learning resources“
–
That’s plenty for now! Have a great week and remember you can get in touch with me directly via email or message me on twitter (@ChrisCundill) with any Scala news, events or content.
