Some talk ideas for next year...

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Ken Scambler

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Dec 19, 2012, 6:52:45 PM12/19/12
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There's some interesting stuff happening in Scala-land, should make for some interesting presentations next year:

- 2.10 with all its cool new features is approaching maturity, and the RC series will probably get promoted to final in the next few months.
- Eugene Burmako is charging ahead with type macros, and an alpha version should be available for fiddling and hacking in the next couple of months.
- Somewhere I blinked and all of a sudden there are a whole bunch of Scala-based web frameworks - Not just Lift and Play but Unfiltered, Scalatra, BlueEyes, DropWizard.  It would be great to see a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these for different things.
- Akka has emerged as not only the king of Actor implementations for Scala, but as a serious player JVM-wide for implementing scalable distributed systems.
- Hopefully Martin will bring out part 2 of his excellent Scala/FP Coursera course next year; I'll be signed up for sure!
- Play 2.0 has a bunch of powerful things like Akka integration out of the box and using Iteratees for I/O; I hope this hasn't been at the expense of its reputation for simplicity and ease of use.  I'd love to see how this hangs together.
- SBT 0.1x continues to attract criticism and controversy for it's parlous documentation and user-repellent DSL; do we need to harden up and get used to it? Will Typesafe improve the user experience?  Are alternatives materialising?

I'm sure there's plenty more.  What would you guys like to see next year?

Tony Morris

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Dec 19, 2012, 7:07:40 PM12/19/12
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On 20/12/12 09:52, Ken Scambler wrote:
> - SBT 0.1x continues to attract criticism and controversy for it's
> parlous documentation and user-repellent DSL; do we need to harden up
> and get used to it? Will Typesafe improve the user experience? Are
> alternatives materialising?
>
> I'm sure there's plenty more. What would you guys like to see next year?

On a slight tangent...

The primary criticism that I have, as do a few others I know, is that
sbt uses maven-style dependency management. While dependency management
is a hard problem, requiring difficult compromises, it chooses the worst
of all worlds. Ivy makes exactly the same mistake. This is unfortunate.

The more commonly articulated difficulty with sbt is that it is "unclear
what does what." This is a consequence of the implementation and
canonical use of Scala's type system and is exaggerated by the fact that
sbt is IO-heavy. This can be fixed with a short amount of work in my
estimation.

--
Tony Morris
http://tmorris.net/

Jason Zaugg

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Dec 19, 2012, 7:14:23 PM12/19/12
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On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 12:52 AM, Ken Scambler <ken.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:

- SBT 0.1x continues to attract criticism and controversy for it's parlous documentation and user-repellent DSL; do we need to harden up and get used to it? Will Typesafe improve the user experience?  Are alternatives materialising?

- We've extracted the incremental recompilation engine and embedded it into Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Gradle, <your build tool here>
- SBT 0.13 will employ a macro so instead of writing:

  keyName <<= (k1, k2).map{ (v1, v2) => v1 + v2 }

You write:

  keyName := k1.value + k2.value

- it will also allow you to configure inter-project dependencies in .sbt config files.

-jason

Ken Scambler

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Dec 19, 2012, 7:27:10 PM12/19/12
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Thanks Jason -- great to hear you guys are working on the UX.   I'll look forward to checking it out.


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Ken Scambler

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Dec 20, 2012, 5:36:59 AM12/20/12
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On 20 December 2012 10:52, Ken Scambler <ken.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:

- 2.10 with all its cool new features is approaching maturity, and the RC series will probably get promoted to final in the next few months.
 
Not quite;  2.10.0 final just got staged today, and will get officially announced first week of January.  Great stuff!

Lachlan O'Dea

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Dec 20, 2012, 5:59:21 AM12/20/12
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On Thursday, December 20, 2012 10:52:45 AM UTC+11, Ken Scambler wrote:
There's some interesting stuff happening in Scala-land, should make for some interesting presentations next year:

- Play 2.0 has a bunch of powerful things like Akka integration out of the box and using Iteratees for I/O; I hope this hasn't been at the expense of its reputation for simplicity and ease of use.  I'd love to see how this hangs together.

I've started using Play 2.0. Loving it so far. It's very strong on type safety compared to most web frameworks, but also supports a dev mode that automatically deploys changes (using sbt).

Lachlan.

Jem

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Dec 23, 2012, 2:17:52 AM12/23/12
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Things that I'd like to see people present in some depth:

* Scalatra
* Akka patterns (perhaps from the "summer of blog")
* SLICK (though I think that's been done and I missed it?)
* Dispatch
* Jerkson
* Scales XML and/or Anti-XML

We use Gatling at AusRegistry for performance testing of our XML/TCP interface, so I've put myself down to talk a bit about that.

Jem


On 20 December 2012 10:52, Ken Scambler <ken.sc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ishaaq Chandy

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Dec 23, 2012, 2:32:39 AM12/23/12
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Hmm, gatling looks interesting. Must have play with it soon

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