Spray VS requests-scala

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.

There's the Li Haoyi's ecosystem of tools and libraries that's fun to hack on, has a low entry-bar (with a design philosophy of using the least complex abstractions for the job), and has few libs like requests and cask that may appeal to those liking some python minimalism. That's not the fastest way to learn hardcore FP, that's not the worst either.

Another thing that caught my attention is the choice for HTTP client. If the authors wanted to go with the simplest thing, they could have picked requests-scala (from the com-lihaoyi family of libraries). If they wanted to go with full blown Scala FP, they could have chosen http4s client (Ember). Sttp awkwardly sits in the middle being neither.

Finally, to give you an example of how simple Scala can be when you get rid of all the fancy stuff, take a look at the examples in Li Haoyi's requests-scala library, a port of the excellent requests Python library. I challenge anyone to call that code complex.

http4s (either with Blaze or Ember) is great, but you may need to think a bit about what you're doing. Maybe https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/requests-scala will be the best choice for your particular situation?