This week in #Scala (18/01/2013)

Welcome to another edition of #ThisWeekInScala.

Firstly, you will be interested to know that Martin Odersky is starring in a musical.  So you knew he was a smart guy who invented a certain cool language, but did you know he could sing?

Secondly, people have begun playing with the new features in Scala 2.10. Macros are powerful, no doubt.  You know the old adage, with great power comes great responsibility. Well,  @puffinfresh is taking his responsibility seriously:

@puffnfresh: #Scala macro naughtiness: turn all vars into vals.

Glad you’re not on his team?  Well, it get’s scarier:

@puffnfresh: #Scala annotation macros and untyped macros are going to change a lot for me. Going to make my own type system with better inference.

Jokes aside, there’s some great features in Scala 2.10 worth checking out.  Like this guy found out…

@tpolecat: Spent some time playing around with string interpolation in #scala 2.10, and my initial skepticism was unwarranted. It’s great.

Right, enough preliminaries, now onto this week’s roundup…

New Stuff

• @heathercmiller happily announced the existence of a ginomous 2.10 reflection & compiler-stuffs guide in the Scala lang docs
• Eugene Burmako wrote an intro to Untyped Macros in the Scala lang docs
• Datomic-Scala is a new lightweight library to simplify the use of Datomic from Scala
• Stephane Godbillon shared the roadmap for ReactiveMongo
• Lift 2.5-M4 is out and there’s builds for scala 2.10
• @gkossakowski created a little tool to help those who have problems with scala compilation times
• @puffnfresh Added his anti-any2unit macro to Scala Wart Remover
• @jasonbaldridge released Chalk 1.1.0 and Nak 1.0 
• The Scalding team at Twitter released Scalding version 0.8.2
• Ray Roestenburg added a new chapter to the Akka in Action MEAP covering system integration
• Miles Sabin has agreed to an interview with the Scala Types about the Shapeless library – watch this space!
• Cory Watson got in touch to say he’s been creating an issue tracker app called Emperor for the past year and it’s based on Scala, Akka and ElasticSearch - See it in action!
• James Moore let me know that he’s released a new version of the Eclipse plugin for Scala on Android

Old Stuff

This week I offer you an introduction to the simple build tool (sbt) by Chris Moos. Stop thinking about cows; grab yourself some milk and cookies and read:

• Getting started with Scala using SBT

EDIT: As @swartzrock and @dcsobral rightly pointed out, the tutorial above is a bit too old to be useful when you consider that sbt is now at version 0.12.x.  Here’s a newer older one, if you know what I mean:

• SBT 0.10 Guide

Blogs & Tutorials

•  The Akka team blog was updated
  • Jonas Boner posted a very important resource: “Where Akka Came From“—a collection of papers, talks and more
  • Jamie Allen explained how to tune dispatchers in Akka applications
•  Brendan McAdams blogged: Distributing Akka Workloads – And Shutting Down Afterwards
• The Scala Types posted part 1 of an interview with Mathias Doenitz, the lead developer of the excellent Spray REST framework
• Jean Qasaur wrote about the “Nuts and bolts of upgrading to Scala 2.10.0“
• Cay Horstmann shared his thoughts following a “first look at Scala macros“
• Mansoor Ashraf blogged: A fistful of monoids
• Pascal Voitot wrote an extensive article about his journey from a data-centric approach to JSON coast-to-coast design touching on Play 2.1, ReactiveMongo and of course MongoDB itself
• Jessie Tron shared her journey from imperative to data flow and then to functional style
• Meetu Maltiar talked about Akka Futures in Scala and shared a simple example 
• Meetu’s colleague Vikas Hazrati blogged about ATDD, Cucumber and Scala
• InfoQ posted a presentation by Geoff Reedy given back at the Strange Loop 2012 conference: Compiling Scala to LLVM
• Daniel Westheide added part 9 to his series “The Neophyte’s Guide to Scala”: Promises and Futures in Practice
• Alex Staveley explained partial functions and partially applied functions for those who have, er.. a partial understanding
• Rintcius Blok pinged me about his post regarding value injection on traits and a Scala security library project where he’s applied the pattern . (There’s a Play framework binding too)

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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.