This week in #Scala (04/01/2013)

Welcome to the first edition of #ThisWeekInScala in 2013.  Happy new year!

Whether you’re into new years resolutions or the new trendy “unresolutions“, ensure Scala is part of your programming repertoire.  2012 was a huge year for Scala, as pointed out by Dustin Marx when he listed Scala and it’s ecosystem as the fifth most significant software development in 2012.  If you’re not coding in Scala yet, I’ll let Typesafe give you the answers to the question “Why Learn Scala in 2013?”

Unashamedly, I’ll be listing content from the past two weeks, given that I didn’t provide you with a post during the holidays.  So let’s get stuck in…

New Stuff

• Hot off the press: Scala 2.10 final is officially available!
• Akka 2.1.0 is out with experimental cluster support
  • The reference documentation weighs in at 424 pages – it’s virtually a book!
• Akka 2.0.5 has been released and fixes several small bugs.
• ScalaIDE V2.1.0 Milestone 3 is available which offers an improved Scala Debugger, JUnit4 support and better relevance metrics in code completion
• The Scala plugin for IntelliJ IDEA 12 makes use of sbt and zinc to faciliate a new, fast way to compile scala
• Specs 1.6.9 – a maintenance release for Scala 2.9.3-RC1
• c10n 1.1 released with resource bundle support, unit testing tool, enum support, better support for Scala & Play2
• FactoryPal - a new Scala framework for creating objects as test data.
• A readable Scala cheat sheet from the Scala docs
• Just before Christmas, Heather Miller and Martin Odersky posted statistics from the Coursera Scala MOOC along with their impressions.  It’s well worth checking out!

Old Stuff

This week I offer you something old but special from Daniel Spiewak.  Part one from his series “Scala for Java Refugees”:

• Scala for Java Refugees – Part 1

(I’ll let you find the other parts for yourself. It’s not hard.)

Blogs & Tutorials

• Episode 26 of ScalaTypes is out and includes Slick talking from Stefan Zeiger
• Rajiv Kurian got in touch to share his blog about a toy Redis Client using Spray, Akka actors, Futures and Promises
• Helena Edelson blogged about the new Try feature in Scala 2.10.0
• Dimitri Charles wrote a quick tutorial about sbt scala and eclipse
• Michael Ahlers told us where to put static unit test resources in an application built on the Play framework
• Gurudev Devanla provided us a view of Scala from Java
• Why Play? – Nice post by Andy Czerwonka
• Munish Gupta shared some content from his Akka Essentials book  with a post on Software Transactional Memory (STM)
• Jed Wesley-Smith of Atlassian blogged about Scala and Erasure
• Matthew Pocock blogged about Safer Serialization in Scala as opposed to Java

Cake is still looking for Scala developers.  Could it be you?

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That’s all folks.  Have a great week. Remember you can get in touch with me directly via email or message me on twitter (@ChrisCundill) with any Scala news, events or content.