This week in #Scala (16/02/2013)

Welcome to another edition of #ThisWeekInScala.  Let me begin by pulling out a tweet from @pvorb which was posted a few weeks ago but is very relevant today…

@pvorb: Fun fact: Work on #Akka began on Feb 16, 2009 ? one day after the initial #Nodejs commit. Both will be four years old in February.

Okay, onto my roundup.  There’s plenty, brace yourself…

New Stuff

• Scala 2.10.1 RC2 and 2.9.3 RC2released!
  • EDIT: As usual, specs2 were quick to jump into the release train with specs2-1.13
• symplyscala-server 0.3 is out and offers the ability to define dynamic server response
• scalikejdbc 1.4.4 is available which fixes two mapper-generator bugs and improves connection management
• AnormCypher v 0.3.0 released by @wefreema
• Mike Slinn got in touch to say he’s launching ScalaCourses.com which will offer some free lectures when ready
• A new chapter called - Stream processing and incremental I/O – was added to the Functional Programming in Scala MEAP book
• CloudBees’ latest app framework popularity update shows Play2 increasing its gain over everything else
• Flavio Brasil is working SMirror, which provides simpler way to do reflection by providing a higher level of abstraction over the Scala 2.10 reflection API
• The improvements of Akka IO in Akka 2.2 look impressive and draw upon knowledge from Spray IO

Old Stuff

This week I offer you a presentation given by Jonas Boner at StrangeLoop 2012:

• Scaling Software with Akka

Blogs & Tutorials

• InfoQ posted a presentation given by Nilanjan Raychaudhuri at the 1DevDay conference which covers Scala and Play among others:  Asynchronous to Real-time Web Programming
  • They also posted an interview with Sadek Drobi, recorded at QCon San Francisco, entitled Play 2.0 Story and what’s new in 2.1
• The slides from Erik Osheim presented at nescala about premature optimization in Scala
• yobriefcasts posted a new screencast about ReactiveMongo
• Konrad Malawski blogged: Macros hands on with “method alias
• Slim Ouertani shared the fun he had with Scala and Vert.x
• Boby Lito wrote an article about Webpipe in the Play framework
• Graham Lea created a cheeky post entitled A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity
  • He followed that up with a survey to ask developers if they’re more productive in Scala – why not take part?
• Alvin Alexander posted a few more tips & tutorials to his existing collection of around 150.  FYI, he’s writing an O’Reilly book called Scala Cookbook
• The Bay Area Scala user group posted a recording of a talk given by Marius Eriksen of Twitter: Effective Scala @ Twitter
• Bill Venners shared his insight into how the use of Scala’s different features affects compile time
• Jacek Laskowski posted: Getting started with sbt and ScalaTest for Scala projects 
• Ayush Mishra of Knoldus shared a tip about rendering page elements without making a server request with Scala Liftweb
• Brian Pugh wrote a follow up to his post about Using Scala to handle exponential growth at a startup
• Pascal Voitot shared something from the “Datomisca delicatessen:” Datomic Queries Coated in a Thin Layer of Scala
• Cake’s own @honzam399 blogged about the OpenCV & CUDA code he recently added to Akka Patterns
• The latest JAX magazine features Jamie Allen giving a tutorial on how to get the most out of Akka
• Micha Kops shared his experience using the Scala DSL for Apache Camel
• Typesafe posted a new case study about Ticketfly which is a powerful reserved seating engine built with Scala and Akka
• Andrew Conner blogged about how to Speed up your Play! controller tests 100x
• Michael Pollmeier shared his experiences creating a custom Scala REPL
• Debasish Ghosh blogged: A DSL with an Endo – monoids for free
• Alexander Chepurnoy compared Play and Scala views in his post: Valid Scala vs. Valid HTML : Play Views vs. Lift Views
• Episode 3 of Scalawags was posted on Valentines Day <3

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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.