I am new to Scala (came from a Java background). I am a SDET. I have learned the syntax through courses on Pluralsight/Udemy and now I want to learn how to test REST APIs using Scala.
I have read online about Akka-http-testkit, Play, ScalaTest, and I have looked at some repo's on Git, but honestly there is no tutorial I have found that really explains things and the documentation for these frameworks is not something I can wrap my head around. Then there is things about Actors having a service and a server, etc. ... I'm lost!
Is there any help I can get that will really give me a step by step on explanation and execution? Many thanks.
Check this channel to know details about Scala and development with testing .
Coming to your questions - Here are the video1, video2 and code link how to use ScalaTest framework.
I'm looking for a socket.io client for Scala. I'm well aware of this, but I cringe at the idea of using it in Scala as it wouldn't feel quite natural nor would it allow for an idiomatic implementation. Does any of you, thus, have a suggestion as to where could I find a Scala client?
If so, just the lines for SBT and a link to the doc will suffice as an answer ;)
I'm afraid I don't know any already implemented libraries or apparent solutions for Scala. But I'll present two very simple approaches that should be very easy to use if you have the time to DIY :-)
But of course it really depends on what you want. As you probably already could imagine a plain WebSocket implementation of Java's standard library can be quite efficient if you need to process simple requests. I found one at scala-lang.org implementing a server calculating random numbers. If it is of interest there's also something brewing at the nightly build which might reveal some handy tricks.
If you want to go for simplicity and for pure Scala in all its might the Actors (in particular a RemoteActor) are immensly powerful. It requires Scala on both ends naturally, but it gives you a messaging-system almost instantly. This is a pretty good start-guide if you aren't already familiar with them.
Anyway. If no good library surfaces I hope this helped. Good luck.
I'm curious what's the "best" way to program RIAs with Scala.
I'm new to Scala and would simply like to know where to start learning. It seems obvious that for web-apps Lift is the perfect choice to be combined with Scala. However from what I've seen so far Lift is not really providing the key to great visuals. Certainly there are hundreds of possible frameworks due to the compability with Java but that's not very helpful.
What would you recommend ?
What is a common set-up ?
Among others I found cappuccino, a very impressive framework.
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/7281
It just seems like Cappuccino is designed for a language named Objective-J. That doesn't sound like great compability to me. Yet somehow they can work together.
http://frothy.liftweb.net/
Well, if you are new to Scala you should probably try Play, because learning a web framework and a new programming language is hard.
Play has a big community and seems to be quite user-friendly (pressing F5 in your browser reloads your code and displays any errors which have occured).
Normally any Java web framework can also be used in Scala, but Play seems to be pretty Scala-friendly.
There are quite a few Scala-specific web frameworks too, but I don't know enough to tell you more about them.
Lift is an powerful and impressive framework, but certainly nothing for beginners.
(I assume "new to Scala" doesn't mean "I programmed in Haskell, ML and Scheme for decades").
Of course it all depends. Personally, I have had no problem starting with Lift even though I’d only used Scala in the REPL before and just for some toying around to get to know the syntax.
It certainly helps a lot if you already know how to use collections in a functional way without explicit loops, so you can read and understand other people’s code more easily. But basically, I’d say it is doable learning both Lift and Scala at the same time even without a background in functional languages. It’s just the collections thing you’ll have to get used to and if you happen to know Ruby (or a language with list comprehensions) you’ll easily understand it.
The Frothy integration has not yet been updated to the newest version of Lift and I don’t know of any site which actually uses it but maybe this is a thing to ask on the Lift mailing list. In any case, I think Frothy only helps you connecting a Lift setup with some Cappuccino frontend but does not provide many wrappers to the Objective-J code, so you’ll still have to write code in Objective-J.
At that point you can ask yourself: Why not write the whole thing with Cappuccino and decide afterwards if Lift integration is actually needed.
Considering Lift alone: You certainly can use Lift with some UI Kit like JQuery UI for the visuals. Lift has many advanced possibilities which make it possible to build complicated web applications but you’ll have to care about the wiring for the visuals yourself.
(And arguably, a stateful, non-MVC (‘view first’) framework like Lift might be better suited for a rich internet application than a pure MVC framework…)
we are considering Scala for a new Project within our company. We have some Junior Programmers with only PHP knowledge, and we are in doubt that they can handle Scala. What are your opinions? Some say: "Scala is a complicated beast!", some say: "It's easy once you got it." Maybe someone has real-world experience?
"My coworkers will not understand Scala" is simultaneously overstating its difficulty and insulting your coworkers.
Scala is not that difficult. It's just another programming language. Any trouble that junior programmers have with Scala is going to be more or less the same trouble they would have with any other language.
Your coworkers are smart. Of course, I don't know them, but it's a pretty safe bet unless your company is the kind of organisation that hires stupid people, in which case, you have bigger problems.
That said, at my company we have some core products developed in Scala, and we don't find that people have any more trouble with it than Java. The code is generally more clear and concise, easier to generalise and reuse, etc.
I guess Scala could be used as a "beginners" language. Even though there are tricky ideas behind it, you dont have to use/explain them in the beginning. If you explain pure OO with Scala, I would say it is straight forward and easily understandable. As Scala reduces a lot of code overhead from other languages it might even be easier to learn concepts with Scala than with Java/C++.
A major drawback I see with Scala as a beginner language is the lack of documentation. Don't get this wrong, the official Scala doc is very good and also the few books that are available are quite useful to get the details of the language, but those have not been written for beginners. For example in Java you find hundreds of books titled something like "Learning OO with Java" you wont find that for Scala which may be a show stopper.
As Hannes mentioned, only do new language introductions within research projects and not productive or even flagship projects. If you have some juniors, that makes the situation even better, take some internal tool, you always wanted and needed and let them create it during a research project. This is also a nice opportunity to experiment with different development-processes. And your juniors most probably like to be challenged and will deliver a good prototype and a very well proofed opinion if Scala can be used as a beginner language.
I believe that most people moving to Scala are experienced and enthusiastic coders. I'd suggest that you get in-house experience with a Scala project with your senior programmers first before forming a strategy for mentoring your junior coders. I'd also suggest that you only involve people who are eager to join in.
I would advocate it. But with the proviso that you have clear guidelines on what language features are acceptable for your team. For example, coding primarily in an imperative style (which is familiar for Java-trained people), or perhaps limiting the employment of recursion or closures.
Also plan for seniors to mentor the juniors. This may take the form of any combination of: pair programming, code reviews, info sessions, regular discussion forums, etc.
The opportunity that scala presents for vastly improved coding on the JVM is too great to pass up. When your seniors get into it I would not be surprised if they find renewed passion for development. When your juniors get into it they will be learning best practice JVM development from the start.
If you choose to go this route, perhaps they'll find easier to use the Scalate framework than a more traditional one like Lift, since it allows mixing HTML with Scala, much in the same way as PHP works.
Scala is a very 'normal' programming language. Any programmer should be able to learn this language. The people that have difficulties learning Scala mostly are experienced with imperative languages and are surprised by the functional concepts. So unexperienced programmers may learn it even faster. In my opinion should be no problem, to assign it to juniors. From a management point of view, I would assign a junior and a senior developer as a team (or more of both, depending on the size of the project).
I think it depends whats more importent for you. If you want to learn as possible about OO Programming and the standard stuff its a bad idea.
But what you really give them is a opportunity to learn something really cool and unique. Witch can be good motivation. Scala has many cool stuff in it. If you can handle Scala you can handle a lot of otherstuff as well.
Talk to the Programmers (all of them) and tell them why you wanne to use scala. Ask if the have to motivation to make and learn something not everybody can do and go the extra mile?
If the are go with it!
My initial thought would be that Scala will be too heavy for them but then I guess because Scala is an OO/Imperitave/Functional hybrid, one could introduce them to the OO/Imperative part of scala until their comfortable, but then again they will probably have bad PHP habits in Scala since scala authors mostly prefer the functional style over the imperative one.
So, it could work, but I would do it for a research project, and definately not for a flagship one.
Edit: Perhaps this should be said also: It seems that functional/OO hybrids like Scala is becoming more popular especially because of how functional languages handles parallel processing as opposed to how we know it in languages like in Java. The amount of cores found in a chip is increasing rapidly, so this is important. However, mentioning PHP, it seems that you are developing web server scripts where threading is less important. PHP doesn't even have threads.
This raises another point. Do you want to develop Scala Web applications i.e. Lift. If so then you have a doubled up learning curve which should also be considered.
Imagine that you would have picked Java and asked whether they could handle Java. If your answer is they could, then they can probably handle Scala.
Scala is only marginally more difficult due to:
No great IDE support. The support ranges from poor to good. Not necessarily an issue for a PHP programmer.
Documentation not as rich as Java
Both Java and Scala have new challenges for a PHP programmer (JVM, new libraries, compiled language, statically typed).
I don't think Scala is a complicated beast, but you do need to understand some of the syntactic sugar and design principles, which would be true of learning Java as well.
Yes, if...
Strategic decision has been made to go with Scala
Company can handle the hit (financial and time) that will come from the steep learning curve.
No, if...
No senior Java, C# or C++ programmers can be put on the project too
Can't find a Scala programmer to act as a lead
Programmers don't have the patience to learn Scala or deal with a language where Jars (libraries) are scattered all over the place, rather than in one or two neat packages like PHP.
*Note: if the junior programmers were C++, C#, or Java Software Engineers rather than PHP, then my answer would be different like, Go for it!
I would not recommend it. My experience of Scala is only from homebrew projects, but I would imagine the currently lousy IDE support, quite frequent API changes and a very flexible syntax (that allows one to hang himself and everybody else participating in the project) would cause a lot of problems in a bigger, more official project.
Give them IntelliJ and throw 'em in the deep end.
Here is a blog post I recently stumbled upon:
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2008/07/java-is-too-academic.html
It shows that even Java can be too academic to be understood by programmers which have no experience in functional programming. On the other hand, Scala allows to write code the "imperative way", so you can avoid all the FP stuff if you do not understand it. In my opinion, Scala is much more concise than Java, so I guess a "junior programmer" should be able to handle it.
I have been working on a project and as I have just started on the webservice I found Lift has been released, so I am curious if there will be much more complication by using Lift over Jax-WS using JDK6.
I am doing this with the Eclipse IDE, but I don't know if I will get much benefit from the IDE on this project.
Lift is written in Scala, so the simple question is do you know Scala? If you don't know Scala but you do know JAX-WS, then Lift will clearly be way more work to get to a working implementation.
Scala and Lift are cool, but unless you are already comfortable with functional programming approaches, they will make your head hurt for at least 6 months. Since they are relatively new they also suffer from a lack of tooling.
You mention that you are using JAX-WS - can you do that with Lift? If you can't do it natively with Lift, can you easily integrate the standard Java libraries for this?
Depending on whether this is a personal project or work-related, your tolerance for taking technical risk can vary widely.