This year was the second year that Camptocamp attended the amazing Scaladays and this year I had the pleasure of presenting the Scala-IO library that I have been working on. For those not familiar, Scala is a ‘better’ Java that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). From the scala-lang.org website:
“Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.”
Over the last few years Scala has become one of the most popular alternatives to Java on the JVM and is seeing adoption in many fields from Finance to Genomics (and Twitter). Here at Camptocamp we have used Scala for a few projects to positive results. We currently have two open-source libraries resulting from this work:
* Scala-IO – An Input/Output library for Scala that is scheduled to be included into the core Scala library.
* http://jesseeichar.github.com/scala-io-doc/latest
* Webspecs – An integration test framework designed for testing Web applications with extensive extensions for Geonetwork testing. Geonetwork is in the process of adopting this library for its integration testing.
* https://github.com/camptocamp/webspecs
Scaladays is the annual Scala conference where Scala enthusiasts from around the world congregate to discuss all things Scala. It is one of the most dense populations of brilliant developers I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. This year the Scala-IO project has reached a level of maturity where a presentation was in order.
The talk is available for viewing at: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/scalaio-intro
Due to time constraints caused by other talks going over time the talk was rushed in the beginning but the talk generated a great response and work is on going to get it incorporated into the core library.
