Currently all our project builds with Maven on Windows. We were not successful with making incrementally compiled code to work in run time (50% of the cases it was failing with some kind of error), so to benefit from warm compiler and (maybe?) properly working incremental compilation we think about moving to SBT. However currently I have only one sprint to work on it, and I'm afraid to put all the eggs in a single basket and try to migrate whole project in a sprint. I need to find a way to make this change gradual, so I could advance one module at a time. So here are the main questions:
How can I include SBT modules in Maven build (or maybe vise versa, having my "parent" in SBT, yet part of the modules still building with Maven)?
How can we still benefit from IDE support (currently IntelliJ 13), like updated indices on changes in pom / Build.scala, task & goals invocation and so on?
Any advises on subject are highly appreciated.
Eventually we did the switch and don't regret it. Writing SBT tasks is easier, because it's plain Scala. Incremental compilation works now (used to fail in Maven with java.lang.InternalError: Enclosing method not found when deployed to JBoss) and build time is significantly faster. Unfortunately we did not find a way to make a gradual switch, so we had to take the risk. Incremental compiled jars still didn't work, yet Typesafe are about to fix this issue in 2.11.6
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When deploying a Scala application, we use SBT on Jenkins. Currently our build action is specified as clean assembly (using Assembly plugin to produce fat JARs). Our build currently takes between 2-3 minutes, which is sensible, but as the project will become larger and deployments for frequent, it might become a bottleneck.
I remember when doing C++ deployment with Visual Studio, clean (Rebuild All) was necessary, otherwise builds were sometimes (say 0.1%) broken (most likely because build missed some changed dependency in headers).
Is this a concern with SBT? Is clean considered a necessary practice to get reliable builds?
My experience is that sometimes SBT gets mixed-up, the most common thing I've seen is that it can't find classes that are part of the project (and not compiled this time around). I haven't had the inclination to really debug it since doing a clean fixes it every time, but for a CI server I would go for clean every time.
I occasionally play with Scala forks and sometimes need to debug these forks on SBT projects. In general, scalaHome works great, but there are a few things that I'd like to find better ways to achieve.
1) Is it possible to have SBT pick up custom scalac class files produced by the ant quick build rather than jar files emitted by the ant pack build? The latter implies 5-10 seconds of additional delay per build, so it'd be great to avoid it.
2) Even in big projects, problems exhibited by scalac usually manifest themselves when compiling single files. Is there a way to tell sbt to neglect its change tracking heuristics and recompile just a single file? What I would particularly like to prevent is recompilation of the whole world when I recompile scalaHome or change scalac flags.
3) Would it be possible to have sbt hot reload scalac classes coming from scalaHome, when scalaHome gets recompiled? Currently I have to shutdown and restart sbt to apply the changes.
1) No, this would make sbt depend on the details of the Scala build. If Scala were built with sbt, you might be able to depend on Scala as a source dependency or at least this could probably be supported without too many changes.
2) No, see https://github.com/sbt/sbt/issues/604
3) sbt 0.13 should check the last modified times of the jars coming from scalaHome and use a new class loader. It is a bug if it does not.
I have recently completed the Scala course on Coursera, and since then I have been looking forward to getting my hands dirty with Scala again. I have written code for some years but I neither educated to be nor work as a programmer, so it took me a while to get a good opportunity but now that I have some time to invest and a good project to work on it's time...
Except I can't seem to get things set up properly, which I find really frustrating. I have OpenJDK 1.7.0_25 running on my Linux machine. I have downloaded and installed the Bundle Scala IDE build for Eclipse (just like we used in the course). And I got ScalaTest both as a jar file and the Eclipse plug-in.
I have a simple project (so far) and no matter what I do I can't seem to get my builds and tests in order. First off how exactly am I supposed to set up my project so that my classes and tests are actually run properly? All the assignments we got were projects that had the same structure, so do I have to have:
project
|--src
|--main
|--scala
|--test
|--scala
structure? If so why is it not the default way the project is setup when I create a new project? Do I create these folders manually, as packages or as source folders? The whole thing gets pretty murky..
I should mention that I tried to "Mavenize" the project using the contextual menu in Eclipse, added my ScalaTest dependency. The first thing that happens is that I get compile errors, at every point of dependency in my code. So clearly the library is not visible, in other words Maven does not seem to be doing much of management. I thought the whole point of Maven was to get and maintain dependencies as the project evolves. I concluded that I do not fully understand the way Maven works and thus I eventually gave up on Maven, once again, and went back to doing things manually.
Secondly, I can't seem to run my tests; the Run As... menu item does not include ScalaTest as it's mentioned in the documentation of ScalaTest Eclipse Plug-in. I have double checked that the plugin is installed. If I instead try to run using JUnitRunner then my tests are not recognized as valid tests. I have JUnit and ScalaTest on my build path, so it's got to be something else.
I suppose my overarching question is as follows:
given the Scala IDE build of Eclipse and ScalaTest, just exactly how am I supposed to set up my project (in Eclipse) so that I can just focus on writing my code and testing it, and hopefully not have any other headaches?
I work alone, and this project is not a product I need to deliver to some client. In other words I do not need to adhere to strict professionalism here. Honestly I just want to be able to code, get better acquainted with Scala and hopefully build a small data analysis tool that I will be using from time to time.
Thanks in advance!
Try using the sbt eclipse plugin:
https://github.com/typesafehub/sbteclipse
This is of course assumes that you use sbt as you build tool. If you don't at the moment you can find instructions on installation and usage here: http://www.scala-sbt.org/
Personally I've been using typesafe giter8 template (https://github.com/typesafehub/scala-sbt.g8) to setup my Scala projects, and then I use the sbt plugin mentioned above to generate eclipse project files.
Scala is somewhat Maven-based (sometimes implicitly), that's why you use that structure.
The easiest way I think is to create a simple Sbt/Maven POM and create the Eclipse project configurations (like with sbt eclipse). There you can set the dependencies (like the actual version of JUnit, Scalatest to use), so you can use the ScalaTest plugin easily.
In case of other issues, feel free to ask at the ScalaTest mailing list, Chee Seng and Bill Venners can help you a lot there.
The Scala IDE website has a full documentation on how to run unit testing frameworks with the IDE, have a look ! If you find missing elements, the bug tracker of the scala-IDE project is here.
I'm currently using IDEA's build mechanism with fsc for developing with Scala. It's still a bit slow and having to (re) start the compilation server is a pain. Many people here are suggesting SBT as a build tool together with IDEA.
What do you consider the pros and cons of each approach?
I tried both and in the end I prefer straight sbt for compiling.
Cons? I really miss being able to click through compile errors and fix the code directly, but... compiling in sbt is just much faster.
The nightly builds of the Idea Scala plugin can vary in quality/performance, but it's been getting better and better lately. The Scala plugin can now flag a number of errors that before I would have had to run compile to catch. (For example, I'm running nightly build 0.4.693 and the new method inspections have already been dead helpful.)
My advice for life with sbt on the command line: start sbt up and leave it running interactively as long as possible to take advantage of everything being loaded and JIT-ed.
sbt left running will fall over eventually but by giving it more memory in your sbt wrapper you can make that happen only rarely.
Here's the sbt launch wrapper that works for me.
java -Xms512M -Xmx1500M -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -jar `dirname $0`/sbt-launch.jar "$#"
My biggest issue with sbt 0.7 is that it frequently goes back and recompiles great swathes of files that seem only tangential to the code I was actually changing. (Even so, still faster than Idea and fsc!)
Good news: sbt 0.9 has some great incremental compile improvements. Unfortunately, the migration path from 0.7 to 0.9 is still in its early days. Mark Harrah's presentation at NEScala is online at http://www.nescala.org/2011/ if you're interested.
Useful plugins
http://github.com/mpeltonen/sbt-idea - easily create and keep your Idea project in sync with your sbt project
http://github.com/orfjackal/idea-sbt-plugin - lets you create run profiles for sbt from within Idea (I found this slower than running sbt at the command line last October - but I see orfjackal is still developing so I should give it another shot)
My goal is to reduce Scala compilation times. I'm using Intellij IDEA 10 with Scala 2.8.1-RC1.
I've read that using SBT will reduce compilation times because it is clever about re-building only the files/classes that have changed since the last build.
I understand that JRebel has a very similar purpose. Is there any point in using JRebel instead of, or in addition to, SBT?
They do different things. SBT has a pretty speedy continuous incremental build system. JRebel dynamically reloads classes into a running program as they are rebuilt. It's something like a Java debugger's ability to modify a running program but with far fewer annoying limitations. SBT and JRebel are complementary.
You might also say that SBT obviates Hudson or other CI tools. Or that it obviates the red squiggly lines your IDE generates when you enter code that won't compile. But those tools are still useful even with SBT, and SBT offers lots of great features beyond CI and hot deployment.
It does obviate Maven.
SBT overlaps with JRebel for me a bit - like when I use SBT to continuously compile and redeploy a web application to jetty (~prepare-webapp). That feels quite a lot like using JRebel to continuously push changes out to a Java application container.
It offers "poor mans continuous integration" with quick code change detection and testing: http://devblog.point2.com/2009/07/27/scala-continuous-testing-with-sbt/
In general, SBT is the make/ant/maven replacement you should use for Scala. I'm constantly impressed with how it streamlines development, and I miss it when I go back to Java/Maven (even with JRebel). You should use it regardless of what other tools and frameworks you find useful.
Hope that helps :)