Josh Suereth is a Senior Software Engineer at Typesafe and the author of “Scala In Depth”. He has been a Scala enthusiast ever since he came to know this beautiful language in 2007. He started his professional career as a software developer in 2004 using programming languages like C++, Perl and Java. In 2009 he began writing the book “Scala In Depth” which provides practical support for using Scala in every day applications. Josh regularly shares his expertise in articles and talks.
Scala is an expressive language, but can be hard to grasp when coming from imperative languages. The key is understanding what expression is in Scala, and how to adapt code to be more expressive. This talk covers the ‘zen’ of Scala development, as well as what changes the new features in Scala 2.10 bring. In particular, the topics covered are:
- Expression oriented programming and basic functional programming
- Simplicity in Design
- Enhancing libraries with Implicit classes and value classes
- Asynchronous programming with Futures and Promises
- Dynamic types for DSLs
- Reflection as a platform to write macros
- Macros and Rainbow Explosion Powers
Erlang has made popular the notation of asynchronous message passing as means of distribution and Scaling. While the idea of “actors” is fundamentally simple, how do we, the software engineers, make use of this abstraction to develop real life, scalable systems? This talk designs a scalable distributed search service using Akka and Scala using the “zen” of Actor based design. It covers the basics of message passing, designing topologies and handling failure and moves onto a few common patterns in actors system design, including service overload detection and tracking user sessions.
