In place of the traditional This week in Scala, I give you This year in Scala. It is my take on what has happened in the Scala and the wider JVM world, and I will even throw in some of my “predictions” for 2014. (We’ll see next year how accurate I was.)
Overall, the Scala community and ecosystem has made great progress towards being
enterprise ready, where
enterprise means reliable, predictable and well-documented; not bloated and over-engineered. (Clojurists will claim otherwise, of course, but
bah humbug to you!). Alongside the core language, we saw the rise of the
Reactive Manifesto, which gives name and common patterns you need to follow to build modern applications. The patterns are applicable to any platform, but seem to fit the current state of the JVM and Scala rather well. Finally, the selection of the Scala libraries, frameworks and projects continued to grow; see the Takipi blog to to find the
top 100 most popular ones.
The core
The core is the Typesafe stack. It bundles together the Scala language, Akka and Play, allowing Typesafe to deliver a complete package for all your enterprise programming needs. (Terms, conditions, support contracts & other goodies applying, of course!)
Scala language
2013 started on a high note following Scala 2.10.0 release, which brought very useful language features such as flexible string interpolation, value classes, futures and promises; all that on top of better bytecode emitter, more powerful matcher, Akka actors now part of the core distribution and much, much more. Check out
http://www.scala-lang.org/download/changelog.html to see if you are truly making most of the 2.10 release.
Alex Albul — Scala Zombie Team Leader @ Lohika
Alexey Migutsky — Senior Scala Zombie @ Lohika