This week in #Scala (23/11/2012)

Welcome to another edition of ‘This week in Scala’! Thanks to an excellent Scala eXchange 2012 (ScalaX) in London with Skills Matter, there’s plenty of video presentations to share.

At ScalaX, I won the excellent MEAP Akka in Action book in a Skills Matter prize draw! A fortunate individual from BSkyB will shortly receive an Apple TV won in the Cake Solutions prize draw.

Martin Odersky was on keynote and described the neat features coming in Scala 2.10. He also described how his hands were made to appear translucent and overlaid the slides in the Coursera class videos. Of the 50,000 which registered for the Coursera class, around 20% (10,000) users handed in all the assignments. This is apparently much higher than the average MOOC which is more around the 5% mark. It was quite funny to see how Martin was blown away by the amount of hands that were raised when he asked the audience if they had signed up for the course.

Scala – and indeed functional programming – continues to rise.  Don’t miss out…

New Stuff

• Scala 2.10.0-RC3 has been staged and will be officially announced on Monday Dec 3rd
  • Library owners: ensure compatibility!
  • Cool kids (who like the latest and greatest): get downloading!
• Unsurprisingly, specs2 were the first to support the latest incarnation.
  •  @rossabaker chirped: “The best way to find out about a new Scala release is to see that @specs2org has already cross built for it.” <- Tis true!
• Scalastyle 0.2.0 gives you 8 new rules to keep your Scala code clean
• Twitter released version 1.1.0 of finatra, a sinatra-inspired web framework for Scala
• Redis client 2.8 which includes support for some Redis 2.6 features

Old Stuff

This week I offer you something by Michael Swain written back in 2008 that seems just as relevant today:

• It’s Time to Get Good at Functional Programming (Dr Dobbs site)

Upcoming Events

• 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

• ScalaX 2012 has given us two-days worth of Scala goodness.  Here’s my choice picks:
  • Martin Odersky’s keynote
  • Specs2 Spring - Jan Machacek <- sneak in Scala at your enterprise
  • Evolving a Scala project successfully – Victor Klang
  • Functional Compilers: From CFG to EXE -Daniel Spiewak <- awesome!
  • Asynchronous and non-Blocking network frameworks – Brendan McAdams
  • Elemica – A Scala success story
  • Real-world scaling with Scala & Akka at Zeebox
  • Akka “Coltrane”: Rise of the Cluster - Roland Kuhn
  • Slick Database Access with Scala - Stefan Zeiger
• The Akka team added to their 2.1 Spotlight series:
  • SSL Support
  • Futures
  • Camel is Back
• Should you learn Scala? Not sure you need any more convincing, but Jean Qasaur offers her argument.
• Soren Schmidt shared his experiences connecting to Couchbase 2.0 from the Play Framework 2.0 with Scala
• Travis Brown wrote an example of searching arbitrarily nested case classes with the shapeless library
• Meetu Maltiar blogged about working with elasticsearch in Scala
• Scala is in the mix at Tumblr which serves 15 billion page views a month and is apparently harder to scale than Twitter!
• Adam Mackler started a good tutorial called “Learning Slick“
• Rob Dickens blogged about a question he asked during the panel discussion with Martin Odersky at ScalaX
• Graham Lea updated his popular guide to learning Scala
• Vikas Hazrati helped us understand the uniform access principle
• Jørgen Sivesind shared a tutorial for creating a reg ex parser with Scala

And finally, at Cake we’re looking for a smart kid (see the end of Martin Odersky’s keynote ) to join us on some Scala projects.  How about you?

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That’s all folks.  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.