April's Scala meeting: proposals?

[Ben Hutchison]

Hi all,

At this stage we have nothing planned for the April Scala meeting, on
Monday 23rd. I haven't yet heard back from Scott from Thoughtworks re:
his earlier message about Scala and the TW Tech Radar.

If you have something you would like to present on, or some activity
or discussion you want to propose, please speak up.

Thanks
Ben

[Andy Gelme]

hi All,

On 2012-03-30 13:49 , Ben Hutchison wrote:
> If you have something you would like to present on, or some activity
> or discussion you want to propose, please speak up.

If anyone has some Akka experience that they'd be willing to present
and/or demonstration ... that would be excellent !

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[Ben Hutchison]

Akka +dojo = Hakkathon?

I don't think Melbourne has an Akka expert-in-residence yet, but I'm willing to install akka and some documentation, hook my laptop to the big screens, pass around a wireless keyboard and mouse, and do "stuff", If there's interest...

Ben

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[Ben Hutchison]

Ken has volunteered to do a talk about the major new Macros feature
being added into Scala 2.10 for the May meeting.

In June, I plan to do the second piece of my talk on Static Types,
which follows on from the talk in gave in Feb.

We still have the April meeting to cover. If anyone wants to present,
please volunteer. Otherwise, I think a practically focused session
would work well.

Both Akka and Play have been mentioned as topics of interest in the
past. One option is to try one of them out by working through the
Getting Started tutorials from the Typesafe Docs. So, if you have a
preference (and want to come along), please let me whether you'd
prefer to focus the session on:

1. Akka
2. Play framework
3. Something else (please specify)

-Ben

[John Mitchell]

+1 for Akka please.

Cheers,
John

[Branko Juric]

+1 akka

[Ben Hutchison]

Ok, it looks like April's meeting on the 26th will be a practical
session focused on Akka.

I will install Typesafe's latest stack incl Akka + IDE + docs. This
includes a Getting Started exercise which uses actors to calculate Pi
to a bazillion digits. Interesting, but not something we need often in
applied software dev.

Where I could use some help is suggestions for other simple Actor
tutorials to do, or existing open source Actor-based systems to look
at or play with?

-Ben

[Jem]

I suggest the "erlang ring benchmark challenge" as shown by Dale Schumacher in this video (3:40)

[Toby Corkindale]

On 5 April 2012 09:20, Ben Hutchison <brhut...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok, it looks like April's meeting on the 26th will be a practical
> session focused on Akka.
>
> I will install Typesafe's latest stack incl Akka + IDE + docs. This
> includes a Getting Started exercise which uses actors to calculate Pi
> to a bazillion digits. Interesting, but not something we need often in
> applied software dev.
>
> Where I could use some help is suggestions for other simple Actor
> tutorials to do, or existing open source Actor-based systems to look
> at or play with?

For Akka, or just in general, I'd love to see more practical examples
for programming with Scala.
Not just synthetic problems to practice using collections or the type
system, but real-world problems where Scala allows much more elegant
or higher-performing solutions.

I guess most of the things I have in mind are larger in scale than
really suit examples though :(
For eg:
Build a system with an in-bound queue of images. Each image should be
scanned for faces, added to a database, and similar faces between
images linked. Distribute the workload in a reliable manner over a
cluster of machines. Then build adaptors to Facebook, Flickr,
Photobucket, etcs' APIs.
Bonus points if you can identify similar cats ;)

Toby

[Ben Hutchison]

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 1:19 AM, Toby Corkindale <to...@dryft.net> wrote:
> For Akka, or just in general, I'd love to see more practical examples
> for programming with Scala.
> Not just synthetic problems to practice using collections or the type
> system, but real-world problems where Scala allows much more elegant
> or higher-performing solutions.

For Scala generally, Twitter is the best example that comes to mind -
they open source lots of their Scala-based enterprise systems:

https://github.com/twitter/repositories

As for Akka especially, a big "me too". Thats one of my big concerns
with Akka. It seems to be "tech first, projects later". The talks Ive
been on akka, on the net and at YOW, always talk about it's tech from
an almost theoretical standpoint, not in the context of particular
use-cases & applications.

-Ben

[Jem]

In that case, what I have always wondered about is how to recreate MDBs with Akka in a way that is dynamically scalable and highly available. i.e. how to process messages from a single queuing system, growing and shrinking across multiple machines as necessary, without having any single machine as a point of failure.

Jem

[Branko Juric]

Yeh, a distributed messaging system with high availability, scalability, resiliency, stability, etc.. I've worked at several companies that are trying to achieve this with various types of middleware and they're still struggling. This is where I hope akka will shine, but I haven't seen or heard of any real examples. In Melbourne at least, I think industrial strength scala + akka is what it's gonna take to get scala into the (dare I say enterprise) mainstream.

[Toby Corkindale]

Have you seen RabbitMQ, or isn't that really what you're after?

--
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

[Branko Juric]

It looks good and can integrate with akka too. Where I'm coming from
though is that some companies want their own "unique" solutions to
give them a competitive advantage. I'm thinking that akka can help
there.

[Toby Corkindale]

Heh, although I've also worked at enough places that had their own
"unique" solutions that were far worse than the popular solutions!
Often it's a lot harder to do things right than it at first seems..

[Jem]

I sent a request for help to Typesafe's Peter Vlugter (whom some of us met at YOW! last year). He pointed me to:

1.  this awesome specification for Akka Cluster (coming in v2.1) which is exactly what I'm looking for; and

2. WebWords - a sample Akka app (it's a web page indexer of sorts)  

Cheers

Jem