Spray VS cats

Compare Spray vs cats and see what are their differences.

Spray

A suite of scala libraries for building and consuming RESTful web services on top of Akka: lightweight, asynchronous, non-blocking, actor-based, testable (by spray)

cats

Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming. (by typelevel)
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Spray cats
1 43
2,521 5,153
0.0% 0.8%
0.0 8.9
about 7 years ago 6 days ago
Scala Scala
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Spray

Posts with mentions or reviews of Spray. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-04-21.
  • Scala: A Love Story
    4 projects | dev.to | 21 Apr 2021
    I purchased the very entertaining book Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. Although I found Haskell fascinating and tempting, I knew it was unrealistic to introduce it in our company. Scala on the other hand looked like it could be the holy grail: All the characteristics I was looking for, no need to abandon the JVM and its cornucopia of tools and libraries, and the possibility for coexistence with Java and therefore incremental adoption. After implementing some simple programs to identify any immediate risks of committing to the language and its ecosystem, I started to introduce Scala in customer projects. Luckily, I was fortunate enough to work with open-minded, curious, and ambitious team members who were also experienced enough to appreciate the benefits of the language. We immediately applied our experience with functional programming, and embraced immutability. Libraries like Slick and Akka HTTP (we actually started out with its predecessor, Spray) made building database-backed REST services a breeze. And the resulting code was robust and highly maintainable. Scala's expressive type system and type inference made it easy to build a restrictive, consistent domain model without bloating the code. There was virtually no overhead. Any boilerplate could be easily abstracted out. In the end, the application code felt natural, concise and elegant. Programming was fun again.

cats

Posts with mentions or reviews of cats. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-05.
  • Beware of teammates who refactor code based on personal taste without proper documentation or completeness. Sounds familiar.
    2 projects | /r/programming | 5 Jul 2023
    A functional programming library: https://typelevel.org/cats/
  • Is Scala worth learning in 2023?
    5 projects | /r/scala | 29 Jun 2023
    Learn something that pays the bill first - nowadays it's Golang/Rust react/typescript. Then you can try some pure fp libs like fp-ts and fp-core.rs, and look through existing scala cats docs. If you'll feel bad about it - that's totally fine and expectable, fp takes a paradigm shift and not that many dev able to shift their brains way of thought due to basic psychological rigidity) (inability to change habits and to modify concepts/attitudes once developed). And that's purely a staffing and management issue - folks hired randoms out of the blue, and called 'em a team.
  • Going into year 2 of Software Development Foundation Degree, have a particular liking for OOP and SQL, any tips, info or pointers on where to go from there?
    2 projects | /r/cscareerquestions | 29 May 2023
    I'm sorry, but have you ever done functional programming for a real company, like in a functional programming language like Haskell, Scala, or F#? Have you ever used Scala cats or scalaz? Have you ever learned category theory and how to apply its abstractions in software? Listen u/judethedude2106 this person hasn't gone as far down the functional programming rabbit hole as I have. Beyond learning the basics like the difference between pure and impure functions, what are closures, what higher order functions are and the most common ones like .map, .filter, and .flatmap, the immutable collections like immutable linked lists and trees, and what a Monad is and common monads like those used for futures/promises, async programming, and Option (Some or None, which is used instead of null checking), the more advanced functional programming stuff like category theory based abstractions are totally useless for real jobs and is just a giant time suck. Don't waste years on functional programming, spend at most a few months on it and no more.
  • rsmonad: Monads in stable Rust (+ Applicative, Alternative, Functor, Monoid, ...)
    2 projects | /r/rust | 24 May 2023
    As a former functional programmer in Scala, please do not go deep into the Category Theory programming. Scala has libraries like this one called "Cats", a cute shortened name for "Category Theory", but code that makes heavy use of these constructs is not understandable to other programmers. Other than using Monads as a design pattern for things like Options (which can be "Some" or "None"), Futures or Promises (which is used for asynchronous programming), and a few other things, please do not make heavy use of category theory constructs in real programming projects that will have other developers working on them. It is a rabbit hole that may be fun but is not super practical. Sure, write pure functions without side effects, but do not use the words "Bimonad", "Invariant Monoidal", and "Semigroup" in your code. The most common, practical application/use of functional programming is basic things like closures, .map, .filter, maybe chaining maps with like a .flatmap or whatever your programming language uses instead of chain or flatmap, and SQL that uses keywords like WHERE which can be represented in code by using a call to .filter. Like the place where these constructs are used most is in data processing like with SQL, ETL (Extract Transform, Load) jobs, Java's MapReduce on Hadoop, Scala's Apache Spark, and other data processing type things. Haskell is not a popular programming language in real world projects for a number of reasons and one of them is the heavy and sometimes impractical use of Category Theory.
  • Tmux, NeoVim, etc. to write pure Kotlin code?
    2 projects | /r/Kotlin | 30 Apr 2023
    At a previous job of mine we actually had an entirely pure Scala ecosystem using cats which instead uses typeclasses, referential transparency, and other FP concepts as the foundations for how to code. So a lot of flexibility to the language.
  • [E => *] Type
    2 projects | /r/scala | 9 Mar 2023
    Thanks! It's used heavily here
  • for comprehension and some questions
    3 projects | /r/scala | 22 Jan 2023
  • Ask HN: How has functional programming influenced your thinking?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jan 2023
    I did work in Scala for a few years. We employed Cats[1], and even a bit of Matryoshka[2] though most of the work I do today is in Python.

    Nowadays I think about computational requirements in terms of relations among behavioral dependencies. Like, "I want to perform operation O on input A and return a B. To do this, I'll need a way to a -> b and a way to b -> b -> b." I often pass these behavioral dependencies in as arguments and it tends to make the inner core of my programs pretty abstract and built up as layers of specificity.

    Zooming out nearly all the way, it makes me feel tethered in a qualitatively unique way to certain deep truths of the universe. In a Platonic sense, invoking certain ideas like a monad make me feel like I'm approaching the divine or at least one instantiation of a timeless universal that operates outside of material existence.

    I'd imagine some mathematicians might see the universe in a similar way - one where immortal relations between ontological forms exist beyond time and space and at the same time can be threaded through the material world by intellectual observation and when those two meet a beautiful collision occurs.

    1. https://typelevel.org/cats/

    2. https://github.com/precog/matryoshka

  • yet another post about type classes in Scala
    2 projects | dev.to | 2 Jan 2023
    Our second type class example attempted to illustrate one last perk: type safety at compile time. It did so with a simplified example of the cats core library for type safety equality comparison between objects. If you're not familiar with cats, go ahead and give it go.
  • Which functional programming language should I learn?
    5 projects | /r/functionalprogramming | 28 Oct 2022
    3) Finally, Scala 3 + cats is a great middle ground. It's a great language to teach and learn FP, even if you learn by yourself, without support from other people. There are lots of materials and even if you get stuck with a concept, you can still implement it using what you knew before.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Spray and cats you can also consider the following projects:

Scalaz - Principled Functional Programming in Scala

Shapeless - Generic programming for Scala

ZIO - ZIO — A type-safe, composable library for async and concurrent programming in Scala

Http4s - A minimal, idiomatic Scala interface for HTTP

Akka HTTP - The Streaming-first HTTP server/module of Akka

ScalaTest - A testing tool for Scala and Java developers

Finch.io - Scala combinator library for building Finagle HTTP services

Monocle - Optics library for Scala

Scala Async - An asynchronous programming facility for Scala

Scalaxb - scalaxb is an XML data binding tool for Scala.

Quicklens - Modify deeply nested case class fields

Dispatch - Scala wrapper for the Java AsyncHttpClient.