It is now just over a month ago that Scala Days 2014 were held. At Plot Projects we are big fans of the Scala language so we attended the conference. Of course there were much interesting talks. Maybe you didn’t get the chance to go or you couldn’t see some of the talks because you attended a different talk at that moment. You can see them now at Parleys. If you haven’t seen those, I would recommend taking a look at these. Here is an overview of the talks we at Plot Projects thought were interesting.
Futures and Async: When to use which?
Scala Async is a library that can ease the development when working with Futures. It allows you to write code just like procedural code, but still make your code non-blocking and asynchronous. It explains some pitfalls when working with Futures and when using the Scala Async library really helps.
Reactive Streams: And why you should care
A more advanced topic on asynchronous code is Reactive Streams. Reactive streams will become an important feature in the next version of Akka. It allows you to work with large, possibly infinite, amounts of data without running out of memory. This works because it will only read from the source when it’s ready to process the data. When the consumer is slow, it will also slow down the producer.
Resilient applications with Akka?
Akka Actors most of the time maintain mutable state. What happens when an Actor crashes? Normally an Actor will be restarted. How then does an Actor recover its previous state? How to log the changes to the state and then how to play back these changes is explained in this talk.
Laugh, Then Learn: Scala Puzzlers Returns!
Scala doesn’t always works the way you would expect. In this talk a couple of examples are shown where it is hard to predict what will happen when the code is executed. More can be found on their website. I guessed a couple correctly, but others completely surprised me. Luckily the team behind Scala announced that they will try to remove most of these “puzzlers” from the language in the future.
The Trouble with Tests
Testing your code is as we all know important. Having good tests help you maintain quality and confidence in your code. In this talk a number of pitfalls are shown. Bad tests slow you down when making changes to your code or don’t help you keeping the quality up. Here are some tips that help you to write better tests.
There were plenty of other talks that were also interesting. This was just a small selection. You can find the other talks that were given at the Scala Days for free at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLklQqdqnBkPh0rzEmtzXHTU_QdulSG010. Which talks did you find interesting?