Scalawags #24

thescalawags's podcast

Scalawags #24: Here's the News

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_11zUvQkncg

your hosts this episode: Josh Suereth, Dick Wall, Heather Miller, Seth Tisue

Intro (0:00)

• Electric Light Orchestra, anyone?
• Josh makes everyone say their name in a comedy accent
• Heather has grown a beard to fit in better with the "1970s Jethro Tull concert" atmosphere at Scala gatherings
  • quote credit: http://tirneb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/scala-exchange-2014-impressions.html
• never pronounce Josh's name wrong again: Suereth’s rhymes with Tourette’s

Java Posse retires! (3:35)

• Scalawags has assumed exclusive ownership of Dick Wall
• standing ovation for the Java Posse
• photo with silly hats: https://twitter.com/javaposse/status/537538289113108480
• Scalawags the podcast was born from the Scalawags segment on Java Posse
• the Scalawags credo: "focus on Scala at length and be idiots"
• to our listeners: please start your own serious, concise Scala podcast
• Daniel keeps tweeting about hearing voices; is he going insane?

Conference roundup (7:50)

• Scala eXchange: Dick is there!
  • which is why English wifi is making him sound like an alien space robot all episode
  • talk videos are up already at:
    • https://skillsmatter.com/conferences/1948-scala-exchange-2014#program
  • Martin's keynote on solving binary compatibility by introducing a new intermediate format
    • namely syntax trees from after the typer phase of scalac
    • more on this in Scalawags #25
    • Josh knows for whom the "who will do the work?" bell tolls
• Northeast Scala Symposium (co-organizer, Seth)
  • http://www.nescala.org/2015/talks
  • tickets sold out in three hours
  • talk proposals closing Mon Dec 8
  • voting on proposals is open through Mon Dec 15
• Scala Workshop (co-organizer, Heather)
  • Portland, Oregon in June
  • growing, a "proper symposium" this year, co-located with PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation)
    • http://conf.researchr.org/home/pldi2015
  • academic-ness level to decline from 80/20 to 60/40
  • staging, macros, data structures...
  • it will be like a tornado, but of computer scientists
• Scala Days, but you know that already
  • San Francisco, Amsterdam
  • http://scaladays.org
  • talk proposers: next time, more "umph" please (?)

Scala 2.11.3 (20:00)

• what the hell happened?
• there was a regression. the release was never announced. we got 2.11.4 instead.
• there should be Scala 2.11.3 T-shirts for hipsters
• and actually anyway 2.11.5 is coming in January (not December)
  • there will be sad orphans with no Scala release to fill their stockings
  • badly behaved children get Scala 2.7

sbt 0.13.7 (22:55)

• we don't need blank lines in our *.sbt files anymore!!!!
  • where should we put them instead?
• there's a weird bug involving XML
  • Seth is shocked and dismayed to learn that people mix sbt and XML

Scala.js (24:45)

• Haoyi Li releases new ebook: Hands-On Scala.js
  • http://lihaoyi.github.io/hands-on-scala-js/
  • it's free. Haoyi is out the $30 Dick would have paid and the $20 Josh would have paid
• there's a book. Scala.js is real now
• Dick: Scala.js was a hot topic at Scala eXchange
• Haoyi is busy, he also has a new parboiled2-based Scala parser. and he has a day job.

ScalaMock (27:25)

• the ScalaMock project is active again
  • http://scalamock.org
• Seth doesn't know why Josh thinks he'd be so excited about ScalaMock
  • but sure, mocking is sometimes a good idea and there should be a good library for it
• why mock, when to mock?
  • external dependencies and services
  • Josh: "mocking makes sense when the cost of writing integration tests is really high..."

Akka 2.3.7 and Akka-HTTP 0.11 are out (31:40)

• Akka-HTTP is nearing 1.0-RC
  • formerly known as Spray
• Akka Streams is progressing too
• Dick has suffered from lack of chunked-encoding support in spray-client
  • but "they've got a story for chunked now... they're getting there"

New NIO layer in scalaz-streams (34:30)

• announced by Eric Torreborre
  • performance improvement: from minutes to milliseconds
• streaming is happening stuff

Scala 2.12.0-M1 (35:25)

• when? we don't know
• when's the right time for the community to jump on it and start testing?
  • we don't know that either
• what features will it have?
  • no. you don't understand. this segment of the podcast is completely information-free.
• we do know that some features will come to 2.11 and 2.12 together
• do we know which features? of course we don't
• backported features may be behind flags
• Josh: if you type -Y, you are in dangerous territory
• -optimize breaks binary compatibility, so look out for that too

Unfiltered 0.8.3 (40:15)

• Josh: "Unfiltered is one of my favorite projects" for making web APIs
  • http://unfiltered.databinder.net/Unfiltered.html
  • 0.8.3 release notes: http://notes.implicit.ly/post/102426212619/unfiltered-0-8-3
• it's on Netty. you pattern match on HTTP requests and return results
• it's by Nathan Hamblen aka n8han and/or Doug Tangren aka softprops

Octoparts (41:45)

• http://m3dev.github.io/octoparts/
  • by guys in Japan from M3
• Dick is very excited because it might have something do with GitHub
  • but it doesn't
• Octoparts is "an API request aggregation service. It works as a middleware between your frontend and backend services, taking care of request parallelization, response caching, fault tolerance and performance visualization."
• read the website yourself, we know nothing about this either
  • but we like the purple ghost. and the graphs.

IDEs (Scala IDE, ENSIME, IntelliJ) (44:15)

• Scala IDE 4.0.0-RC1 is out Dick has been using it
  • http://scala-ide.org/blog/release-notes-4.0.0-RC1.html
• it's Eclipse, it uses Scala's presentation compiler, and now it works with multiple versions of Scala (2.10 + 2.11)
  • "exciting but terrifying"
• as usual Seth won't shut up about Emacs
  • ENSIME also uses the presentation compiler
  • https://github.com/ensime/ensime-server
  • ENSIME development has picked up again lately after Aemon got too busy and has come a long way in the last year
  • Rory Graves gave an ENSIME talk at Scala eXchange:
    • https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/6000-ensime-the-other-ide
• IntelliJ's Scala support has been updated, too
  • Dick's Play projects all broke? "they fixed it", he hastens to say. "they're reacting very quickly"
  • sbt plugin is now "woven into" the Scala plugin

Conclusion (50:40)

• Scalawags #25 will feature Martin somebody