This week in #Scala (01/02/2013)

Welcome to another edition of #ThisWeekInScala.  My favourite #Scala tweet this week came from @Symbo1ics:

@nicolasleroux: It’s not that #Scala or #FP are hard, but that people are afraid.

Sure, FP can take some getting used to when coming from an imperative background, but don’t let the fear of the unknown get in the way!  Grab your favourite brew and let me take you through this week’s Scala goodness…

New Stuff

• Typed Channels have been added to Akka – watch this space!
  • There’s already some doco too
• Orr Sella got in touch to say he’s released an sbt plugin for Sublime suitably called sbt-sublime which generates Sublime Text projects .  That’s not all, it also downloads all dependency sources, and makes them available in the same Sublime window.  Check out his blog post for more details.
  • This ties in nicely with the new Sublime Text 3 Beta which has a great new feature called “Goto Definition”
• Gaëtan Renaudeau releaed a new Scala library – PlayCLI – which facilitates integration with UNIX commands and Play-Iteratees
• scala-util library got pushed up to 0.4.1 to include the latest Netty 4 HTTP updates and Wactor (Wasted Actor) got a ForkJoinPool as default
• Stephane Godbillon announced the roadmap for ReactiveMongo and the state of ReactiveMongo 0.8
• Manning Books have announced a “Week of Scala” starting Monday 4th February with competitions and daily discounts!

This week I offer you a presentation given by Cake’s own Jan Machacek at SpringOne2gx 2012 in WashingtonDC which introduces Scala, Akka-based applications especially for Java/Spring developers:

• Akka Eye for the Spring Guy or Gal

Blogs & Tutorials

• Michael Pollmeier got in touch to share his blog post on the new reflection API in Scala 2.10
  • Check out the Scala docs for more on Reflection, TypeTags and Manifests
• Michael has also just taken over the maintenance of gremlin-scala which is a DSL for  traversing graph databases, e.g. Neo4J, Rexter, etc
• Franz Bettag shared a nugget on his blog of using Scala Implicits with Netty Channels
• Naveen Gattu of Klout shared their use of Iteratees in Big Data
• Ryan Tanner blogged how he ported Play 2 auth to use Slick instead of Anorm
• Yobriefcasts.tv published the second of its Play 2 screencasts: Part Two – Controllers, Actions, Views & Routes
• Jaime shared the experiences of using Scala at his startup: The impact of Scala in Qamine
• Mads Hartmann posted about his promising thesis work on Semantic Search for Scala
• Alex Staveley answered the question: Scala pattern matching: A Case for new thinking?
• Meetu Maltiar followed up his post about composing Futures last week with: Akka Futures: Using For Comprehensions
• Marcelo Olivas shared how he came to understand implicit classes by using the Play framework
  • Marcelo also discovered view templates in Play 2
• Cake’s own @honzam399 added an Akka AMQP client with C++ daemon to his Akka Patterns github project and promised corresponding blog post will come!
• François Armand blogged about measuring the compile time per file for a Scala maven project
• Tom Switzer of Precog posted a detailed explanation of Monad Transformers: Wrapping an Astronaut in a Burrito
• Paul Butcher wrote part two of his performance analysis of different routing strategies for Akka
• Martin Krasser wrote an in-depth article about Event sourcing and external service integration
• Stephan of LearnScala.de got in touch to share an interesting post about using Scala Macros as a teaching aid!
• Debasish Ghosh shared another implementation of the cake pattern in Scala

And finally, if you’re looking for a Scala role, have you considered working for Cake?

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That’s all for now. 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.