Scala School

http://twitter.github.io/scala_school/

by Baustin • 13 years ago

164 73 13 years ago

twitter.github.io

MojoJolo3• 13 years ago

If you guys really into Scala, I really recommend trying Finagle (https://github.com/twitter/finagle). It was also created by Twitter. It was a lightweight HTTP server and client for Scala. It's my favorite. With just a "single" line of code, you can create an HTTP server in Scala.

I usually combine it with Rogue (https://github.com/foursquare/rogue), an "ORM"-like for MongoDB. I used Finagle and Rogue to build a fast and lightweight REST API.

atto• 13 years ago

ReactiveMongo (http://reactivemongo.org/) is coming alone nicely as well, and has some great non-blocking and reactive features.

smrtinsert• 13 years ago

As someone getting into scala, where can I find the list of top available libs? For clojure I just browsed github, but I feel there probably is some resource out there I'm missing.

gtani2• 13 years ago

this is a pretty good blog, but it's best to ask on mailing list or IRC if googling cant find something

http://notes.implicit.ly/

MojoJolo3• 13 years ago

What I love about Scala is that all (most, if not all) libraries built in Java can also be used. This includes those awesome apache libraries.

For Scala written libraries, here's a link to Github page: https://github.com/trending?l=scala

cgag• 13 years ago

For clojure, these are good: http://www.clojuresphere.com/, http://www.clojure-toolbox.com/, http://clojure-doc.org/

terhechte2• 13 years ago

Does it support Swagger now? For my last implementation, I wanted a good automatic API documentation, and I'd rather have the client code in a generated way, and of the three Scala microframeworks that I had a look at, only Scalatra had kinda solid Swagger support. Neither Spray nor Finagle did. Though in hindsight the Swagger release in the current Scalatra is a bit old and thus it has tons of bugs and issues that are fixed in current Swagger but I found it impossible to just update Swagger.

brown9-22• 13 years ago

I believe that Twitter tends to define their services as Thrift interfaces, which forms it's own documentation for the application rather than having to crawl through code to find which REST URL endpoints are being listened to.

I could be wrong but I think Finagle reflects this in that Thrift is more of a first-class citizen than REST (although I'm sure the latter is possible).

lmm5• 13 years ago

Finagle doesn't tend to be so well integrated with the rest of the ecosystem - IIRC there isn't even a scala 2.10 release out yet. I'd recommend spray (http://spray.io ) if you want to do async http in scala.

(That said, I do think the twitter scala style guide is very good: http://twitter.github.com/effectivescala )

theatrus2• 13 years ago

Finagle and "util" both have 2.10 builds available.

As for bridging Twitter Future with (now) Scala Future, that should be coming soon, once the execution context stuff is squared away.

SubMachinePun• 13 years ago

How do Rogue and Casbah stack up against each other?

rit• 13 years ago

Very differently (I'm the original author of Casbah, though I gave up maintainership a few months ago when I joined Typesafe).

Casbah was always created to be a straight MongoDB driver, with no ORM features. It has no dependencies on "external" projects other than the MongoDB Java driver, so that you can use it where-ever and write standard queries.

It has been awhile since I played with Rogue, so forgive any mistakes but the big one: Rogue is specifically built as an ORM, with integration into Lift.

Really, you are going to use Rogue vs. Lift to accomplish very different tasks. There is Salat (https://github.com/novus/salat), to provide ORM features on top of Casbah.

Pick which tool works best for your use case! I happen to think quite highly of Rogue as well, as there are some tremendously impressive features in it including detecting potential Table scans. Rogue is fairly well battle tested on the Foursquare systems, and the authors are both very, very good at what they do.

eranation2• 13 years ago

Few other great learning resources for Scala:

- a "JSFiddle" like editor for Scala: http://scalakata.com

- Interactive tours: http://scalatutorials.com/tour, http://www.scala-tour.com, http://www.simplyscala.com

- Learn Scala in X minutes: http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/scala/

- Typesafe Activator: http://www.typesafe.com/activator

- Official docs of course: http://docs.scala-lang.org/

MojoJolo3• 13 years ago

I would also like to add:

- To manage dependency, use SBT (http://www.scala-sbt.org/).

- For IDE, I recommend Scala IDE (http://scala-ide.org/).

tmarthal• 13 years ago

People are doing all sorts of great things with Scala.

Scala Notebooks, which can be classified as a learning resource https://github.com/n8han/scala-notebook/ - It is an in-work conversion of iPython notebooks using d3 instead of matplotlib.

Another great analysis resource is Saddle, a scala data munging library (analogous to pandas, around the 0.8 revision). http://saddle.github.io/

applecore• 13 years ago

Starting out, it makes sense to just "write Java in Scala", and gradually introduce the advanced concepts of Scala as you learn them.

That way, you can be immediately productive.

catnaroek5• 13 years ago

That way you can delude yourself into thinking you are productive, because you are writing code immediately. However, productivity is not to be measured by the number of lines of code; rather, by 1. the amount of actual functionality implemented, 2. the elegance of the design (which saves time refactoring later on).

lmm5• 13 years ago

It's easy to forget the value of delivering functionality immediately. It's all too easy to spend a long time on an elegant design that doesn't actually serve business needs. I like to follow an agile approach where if something can't deliver value in 2 weeks then it's not worth doing (or, more likely, needs to be split into smaller pieces). That's plenty of time to learn enough Scala to be more productive than you were in Java, even though it will take months or years to learn the full language.

trailfox• 13 years ago

...and the only way you learn how to write more elegant code is to start writing code...

rybosome3• 13 years ago

The danger of that approach is that, in my experience, it's more likely to turn someone away from Scala. At my last job, some of the engineers did write Java in Scala. In what I'm sure is not a coincidence, they were also the ones who disliked Scala the most, and felt that it was detrimental to our codebase. By not learning its differentiating features, all they saw was the burden of having two languages, library support, spotty IDE, painful Scala upgrades, etc. In fact, since I've left, I've heard that they are migrating a lot of the Scala back to Java; the effort is being led by those who never wrote idiomatic Scala. Again, I'm sure this is not a coincidence.

ericssmith• 13 years ago

Pattern matching, immutability, option types, combinators, traits are not advanced features in Scala. They are fundamental concepts. To be productive in Scala, write in Scala. Otherwise, you will needlessly waste a huge chunk of your life, including having to go back and clean up your messes.

dustingetz2• 13 years ago

I'm leading a scala transition at a javashop. I think you need a crital mass of people who understand scala as well as a lot of respect for your colleagues for this to go smoothly, 10x so if you have legacy code. There will be some very tense discussions about how things ought to be implemented, and if not well managed, it can feel like "this approach is wrong, your code is bad and you are a bad engineer" which is toxic to any team. Sorry on mobile or I would write more. There is a lot of blog activity on this subject both from successful teams and unsuccessful that your leads absolutely must understand

catnaroek5• 13 years ago

It should be evident to anyone with a modicum of understanding of what types are for, that Scala is a superior language to Java. (And Haskell even much more so, but Scala is friendlier to your existing investment in a Java codebase.)

There will be some very tense discussions about how things things ought to be implemented (...)

Encoding as much as possible of the problem domain's logical constraints in types. Any property enforced by a type checker (and not subverted via a type system escape hatch) is a property that you do not have to test.

(...) and if not well managed, it can feel like "this approach is wrong. your code is bad and you are a bad engineer"

My experience with most programmers using Java/C#/Python/whatever is precisely that: "Their approach is wrong. Their code is bad. And they are bad engineers." I have to waste my precious time subverting their brittle type systems (downcasts, reflection, assuming stuff is not null, etc.) and enforcing correctness the hard way (extensive testing or even good old non-computer-assisted brain usage), when I could simply read type signatures, get free theorems, run a couple of tests for checking stuff that cannot be inferred from types, and move on to the next thing.

mikkelewis• 13 years ago

It's worth mentioning that I got into Scala because of Akka. Amazing features like remote actors, supervision and more. I also appreciate how active the project is :) https://github.com/akka/akka

kclay• 13 years ago

Akka is great I just launched an app into beta with Play( websocket game) and Akka , currently I'm trying to get a hang of the clustering features so I can distribute my connections out.

karavelov• 13 years ago

I am learning Scala last couple of months. Twitter scala page is really nice for starting up. Another place with discussion of more advanced topics I find useful:

http://danielwestheide.com/scala/neophytes.html

joshz• 13 years ago

Coursera has a class as well. Martin Odersky tweeted a while ago about a possible advanced course in the fall but it doesn't look like it's happening yet.

http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

pramalin• 13 years ago

I finished the course when it first came out last year. This appears to be the third session of the same class. I'm also eagerly looking for an advanced course. I used Scala in "Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1" programming problems. Even as some algorithms are described in recursive style, using tail recursive implementations fail for large data sets and I have to fallback to imperative styles with lots of mutable data structures to complete the assignments. A Scala based algorithms course would be very useful.

arms• 13 years ago

This looks great. My favorite resources are those that assume prior programming knowledge and aim to get the reader up to speed quickly with the specifics of the language, not programming in general. If anything, I think I'll start studying pattern matching :)

rlbaker2• 13 years ago

I've been interested in venturing into Scala but have not found a good resource for getting a development environment setup. Should I be using an IDE or will sbt/Sublime be sufficient?

mikegagnon2• 13 years ago

sbt + sublime is certainly sufficient. I program in Scala all day long. I know many developers use the IntelliJ IDE.

ssmoot• 13 years ago

You'll level up much faster with an IDE (IMO).

Ensime in Sublime is kinda pointless I think since it only updates on file change. The REPL and SBT integration is nice.

I use Sublime for quick examples in Scala, or as a VIM alternative for larger projects (as opposed to my main editor like with Ruby).

For most of my Scala work I use IntelliJ though. The lack of half-decent theming in Eclipse and Preferences/Settings being all over the place really puts me off ScalaIDE personally.

Going from Zero to Code in IntelliJ and SBT (on OSX) is pretty trivial. Given a command-line "Hello World" with a traditional Maven layout:

First, install IntelliJ, navigate to "Plugins" under preferences and install the Scala plugin.

Now make sure you have Homebrew installed (http://brew.sh)

  $ brew update
  $ brew install sbt --devel # currently 0.13.0-RC5
  $ cd ~/src/
  $ mkdir hello-world
  $ cd hello-world
  $ mkdir project
  $ echo "sbt.version=0.13.0-RC5" | tee project/build.properties
  $ cat <<EOS | tee project/plugins.sbt
    resolvers += "Sonatype snapshots" at "http://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/"

    addSbtPlugin("com.github.mpeltonen" % "sbt-idea" % "1.5.0-SNAPSHOT")
    EOS
  $ cat <<EOS | tee build.sbt
    name := "hello-world"

    version := "1.0-SNAPSHOT"
    EOS
  $ mkdir -p src/main/scala
  $ cat <<EOS | tee src/main/scala/Whatever.scala
    object Whatever extends App {
      println("Hello World!")
    }
    EOS
  $ sbt
  > compile
  > gen-idea
  > run

And there you go. It could be simpler if we were having a LOC competition, but this is actually very close to the exact setup I use for projects day in and day out, including getting a jump on the next version of SBT and best-practicey stuff like setting the SBT version in build.properties.

If this were a Play app, you might have a "project/plugins.sbt" that looked something like this (to get a jump on the upcoming Scala 2.10 version of Play, that integrates with SBT 0.13.x):

  // Comment to get more information during initialization
  logLevel := Level.Warn

  resolvers := Seq("Maven Central" at "http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/",
                "Typesafe Snapshots" at "http://repo.typesafe.com/typesafe/snapshots/",
                "Typesafe Releases" at "http://repo.typesafe.com/typesafe/releases/",
                "Sonatype snapshots" at "http://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/")

  addSbtPlugin("com.typesafe.play" % "sbt-plugin" % "2.2.0-M2")

  addSbtPlugin("com.github.mpeltonen" % "sbt-idea" % "1.5.0-SNAPSHOT")

This just adds a few more common resolvers you might use for dependencies, and locks you to the latest Play milestone snapshot. You can pretty much otherwise copy/paste files/folders from a sample Play app, like you might see with the Typesafe Activator for example.

Good luck!

rlbaker2• 13 years ago

Wow, thanks so much for this! I really appreciate it.

gtani2• 13 years ago

Excellent, thx.

(just remember "brew doctor" first).

Also for non-maccies: http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.13.0/docs/Getting-Started/Setup.h... (it would be nice to discuss the red hat and debian distro families in that Setup page, it looks like you can't currently "apt-get sbt"

dubbledidu• 13 years ago

  > The lack of half-decent theming in Eclipse and
  > Preferences/Settings being all over the place
  > really puts me off ScalaIDE personally.

Agree. I can recommend http://eclipsecolorthemes.org/ combined with https://github.com/jeeeyul/eclipse-themes.

user12413202• 13 years ago

there's this https://github.com/n8han/giter8 project that's supposed to create scala project templates for you from the command line, but never really got into it so i can't really comment.

terhechte2• 13 years ago

I'm using Scala with Ensime in Emacs. It is not as good as the Scala IDE, but it is quite good. The reason I'm doing it is that I like to use the same editor for all the languages that I'm using, so that any additional plugins / modifications I do are not just for this one language, but can be leveraged for everything I do.

However, If that is not a requirement for you, you should really be using the Scala IDE (Eclipse plugin), it has great autocompletion, refactoring, and more.

I have to say I also started with Scala IDE because, when starting with a completely new language, I tend to just install the default IDE so that I don't have to fight two battles in the beginning but can concentrate fully on the language. Otherwise, you'll loose interest / give up even faster.

brown9-22• 13 years ago

Take a look at Typesafe Activator - www.typesafe.com/activator - it's a pretty slick way to get up and started without all the IDE setup costs by simply running an IDE for you in your browser.

pkinsky7• 13 years ago

I've finished Martin Odersky's Scala Course. I've built a few small play2.0 apps. I've used Scala to solve ~20 Project Euler problems, and I'm fiddling around with parsers and scalaz.

However, all the Scala positions I've found are looking for engineers with experience using Scala in production. How can I make that jump? Are there any opportunities out there for junior engineers who are proficient in Scala?

jorgeortiz85• 13 years ago

Send me your resume: jorge@foursquare.com

eranation2• 13 years ago

If you are in the UK, let me know...

pkinsky7• 13 years ago

I'm on the other side of the pond, sadly.

chiurox• 13 years ago

If finding a Scala position in the US (I assume) is already this difficult, here in Brazil it's infinitely harder. I guess our startup is one of the very few that has a fairly large system in production running on Scala, Play, and Akka. It's next to impossible to find people with experience yet alone experience in production. The key is to find people genuinely interested in learning.

ropiku• 13 years ago

I went the other way, started working at Twitter without knowing Scala and it wasn't hard. We also have great internal Scala classes. Feel free to email me for more info (see profile). We're just looking for smart people, you don't need to have experience with Scala.

pkinsky7• 13 years ago

sent, thanks!

rybosome3• 13 years ago

Be careful; once you've been working in Scala, going back to Java is unpleasant. =)

seanmcdirmid4• 13 years ago

I worked with Scala at EPFL during my 2 year post doc (in Martin's group). I later started working for Microsoft, and found the transition to C# to be initially painful but not incredibly so. I'm now a happy C# programmer, though I take a lot of liberties [1] with the system, and I also use C# mostly to build programming systems of my own [2] (though Scala has had an everlasting influence on my own work).

C# is a bit more advanced in Java (they have lambdas), and in someways better than Scala (reified generics). But the best thing about C# is that...it forces you to to settle on less elegant but functional designs in a "worse is better" style. I found myself obsessing over my Scala code to come up with perfect solutions because...I could...while in C# perfect solutions obviously don't exist. C# relieves the burden of choice, which is an interesting trade off to keep in mind when designing PLs.

[1] http://bling.codeplex.com/

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1898...

islon• 13 years ago

I did that and could't go back to Java, but then I learned Clojure, and now I can't go back to Scala =)

dberg• 13 years ago

send me your resume developer@huffingtonpost.com

pkinsky7• 13 years ago

Thanks, sent!

sbilstein• 13 years ago

Linkedin uses Scala for many different teams. My team does. Apply and tell the recruiter you want to work for a team working with Play with Scala.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

sorry to nitpick,

the unicode didn't render properly on chrome stable, windows 7

"From ∅ to Distributed Service"

otherwise quite interesting

pavanred• 13 years ago

Bookmarked, I needed this, very helpful. Thanks.

stickhandle• 13 years ago

Timely. I'm interested in scala. Would love a couple opinions from those in the know ... (1) As a (very) experienced java guy, what's really the best learning approach: comparative? clean slate? I'd "like" to do Odersky's course, but I can't commit to scheduled tasks; (2) A minimal framework seems like a good idea to me - rather than Play!, what do folks think about Scalatra as a starting point?

wiradikusuma• 13 years ago

if you want smoother transition, try my approach: code with Java style (OOP, imperative) but using Scala syntax. once you're familar with the new syntax, naturally you will wonder, "this seems clunky, there's got to be a way to do this the Scala way". and you'll start googling "how to do X in a list" etc.

to lower the bar, don't use framework. i even coded http://ngajakjalan.com (one of my projects written in Scala) without framework, just plain servlet+JSP. again, eventually you'll think, "i keep doing the same thing, there's got to be some library out there already doing this for me", and start exploring.

campnic• 13 years ago

I've been looking for examples of applications built with scala and akka that I can learn from. I've built small, toy-ish stuff but I feel I learn a lot by looking at examples. Any have any recommendations?

user12413202• 13 years ago

after years of java coding, i started following the scala "trend" but had no chance of actually using it where i used to work. nonetheless, i did coursera's odersky course and started using it here and there for (very little) personal projects. with that in my toolbelt i was able to find the job i now have. they were using scala/akka/play (but also scalding and other stuff) and they were okay with somebody with little experience but willing to commit to it. i accepted and now have spent 4 months away from java and diving into scala and i just love every bit of it (even SBT that at first looked very little interesting).

Scala School

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