Akka, Spray and Play to come Together

http://scalalearn.com/akka-spray-play-come-together/

by michaelpnash • 13 years ago

40 22 13 years ago

TylerE4• 13 years ago

Now if only they had a decent DB library/ORM. (And no, Slick isn't it)

civild• 13 years ago

I quite liked the look of EBean, though I haven't really used it much. Even so, it's fairly easy to plug in a JPA manager (in my case, Hibernate) and use the helper classes provided for DB management.

Edit: should add that I'm mainly familiar with the Java play framework aspects, not so much the Scala end.

jhuckabee• 13 years ago

I've just recently discovered Slick only by noticing it performed quite well in TechEmpower's last round of benchmarks. So I'm genuinely curious, what's wrong with Slick?

TylerE4• 13 years ago

It's a lot of ceremony for not a lot of convenience.

See: http://slick.typesafe.com/doc/1.0.1/lifted-embedding.html#in... and notice how much is involved in doing a simple insert into a table with a primary key.

terhechte3• 13 years ago

I recently learned Slick, and it was a hellish ride. First of all, a large part of the problems I had were an unbelievable terrible documentation. Sometimes, in order to do even the simplest things, I had to look into particular unit tests deep within the sources of the project, or follow stackoverflow discussions with multiple proposals, only one of which actually worked. Oftentimes this was for things which I considered granted and implemented. The certainly best example is getting an object by id. I would have thought that this, being the most basic operation, should be possible through some kind of default operation like "get" or "getById" or "objectById" or something else. Instead, you have stackoverflow answers like this:

def findById(userId: Int)(implicit session: Session): Option[User] = { val query = for{ u <- Users if u.id === userId } yield u query.firstOption }

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16461260/select-single-ro...

However, that's not even the brink of the iceberg. Try finding out how to update multiple fields in an object. Say you retrieve a User object, and you want to set a new email, zip, and address. I'd suppose, this would work with simple getters and setters, i.e.:

user = Users.get(user_id) user.email = new_mail user.zip = new_zip user.address = new_address

Instead, you have to do this:

val map = Query(User) .filter(_.id === user_id) .map(ab => ab.email ~ ab.zip ~ ab.address)

map.update((new_mail, new_zip, new_address))

And even that only works with updateable result sets. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16757368/how-do-you-updat...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scalaquery/ML56aZAfy3g...

Or, to quote from the stackoverflow answer above: "Typesafe, why your documentation is so bad ? I have to Google pretty much every silly thing or dig through unit-tests for hours. Please improve it. Thanks."

Now, after a lot of searching, I found solutions to all of my problems, but it took a long time, lots of Google, and almost nothing came out of their awful documentation.

asdf1234• 13 years ago

Slick generates some pretty bad SQL with deep nested select statements for some pretty typical join queries. That alone was a deal breaker for me. It also doesn't help that Typesafe has been fairly quiet regarding the future of Slick as of late.

GyrosOfWar• 13 years ago

From what I've read in the Play documentation, this is intentional. [0] They say:

SQL is already the best DSL for accessing relational databases.

I have no real opinion on the matter, as someone who doesn't like working with databases very much, I appreciate the comfort a ORM mapper gives me, but so far, all my web apps have been very small and basically trivial, so I don't know how they work with bigger projects.

[0] http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.2.x/ScalaAnorm

TylerE4• 13 years ago

I don't find working the SQL in Scala to be very much fun. You end up having to write lots of marshaling functions and other such cruft that isn't application logic. As someone used to dynamic languages this makes the code very ugly and verbose.

the1• 13 years ago

jdbc is real good

pramalin• 13 years ago

I have been very happy with MyBatis in Java projects and will use its scala version if I start on a Play framework project.

trailfox2• 13 years ago

I'm interested to see the effects of the spray optimization work making its way into Play.

djKianoosh• 13 years ago

I like the "philosophy" section on the Spray site: http://spray.io/introduction/what-is-spray/

It speaks nicely to what it should and shouldn't be used for at a high enough level that people new to it can understand quickly.

fingerprinter• 13 years ago

This is really awesome news. I like Play and AKKA is really good.

In the past I've used Erlang/OTP and loved it, but with this news, I might use this instead.

microtonal• 13 years ago

This was covered by Typesafe's announcement. The linked 'article' seems to be spam for the author's books. The fact that the submitter is the author of the blog post and had no karma before posting doesn't bode well.

dk8996• 13 years ago

Slick, although looks promising, is not ready. Lack of documentation, examples, and voodoo syntax. If anyone can tell me what $, #$, and +? inside sqlu statement are?

So here is something I found. Its a benchmark for some of the ORM frameworks out there. Slick doesn't do too well.

http://databen.ch/

Akka, Spray and Play to come Together

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