Our great sponsors
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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Spray
A suite of scala libraries for building and consuming RESTful web services on top of Akka: lightweight, asynchronous, non-blocking, actor-based, testable
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Slick
Slick (Scala Language Integrated Connection Kit) is a modern database query and access library for Scala (by slick)
Scala has sparked a huge ecosystem of very high quality libraries (Cats, Scalaz, shapeless, to name but a few). I think a major reason for this is that Scala attracts developers who value the advantages of the JVM, but are fed up with the limitations of the Java programming language and understand the benefits of an expressive type system and functional programming.
Scala has sparked a huge ecosystem of very high quality libraries (Cats, Scalaz, shapeless, to name but a few). I think a major reason for this is that Scala attracts developers who value the advantages of the JVM, but are fed up with the limitations of the Java programming language and understand the benefits of an expressive type system and functional programming.
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.
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.