decodified

Introducing the spray-can HTTP server/client

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:55:00 +0100

While continuing our work on spray (the lightweight framework for building RESTful web services with Scala and Akka) as well as our own commercial application built on top of it, we have come to more and more succumb to the “Scala way” of writing software. Our code has become more functional, our data models more immutable and everything just somehow more “granular” and easier to manage than ever before. While all this feels great and puts a lot of fun back into where it had sometimes started to dwindle there is also a downside to it: Working with “old-school”...

spray 0.7.0 released

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:55:00 +0100

After a lot more time than originally planned the second spray release has finally hit its scala-tools.org shelves. It features a great many changes, extensions and general improvements over the first release, mainly:

Compatibility with Scala 2.9.0-1 and Akka 1.1.x
Independence from Akka Mist
A client module for consuming other REST APIs
Support for gzip/deflate compression, authentication/authorization (incl. HTTP Basic Auth), proper server-side caching, even better path and parameter matching, case class extraction, spray-json and Tomcat 6
27 closed tickets
Vastly improved documentation

The point about the removed dependency on Akka Mist deserves some...

BlueForest - A dark color scheme for IntelliJ IDEA

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 11:55:00 +0100

Up until last November I had been working exclusively with bright editor backgrounds for all my development work. Mostly because the IDEs I used always came with a dark-on-bright default color scheme and I didn’t bother fiddling around with color settings, especially since modern syntax-highlightings makes appealing color schemes much more complex to create.
Then however, at the beginning of the last northern hemisphere winter, I got a new monitor that was brighter than all the other ones I had before. Even though it gave me lots of highly appreciated additional screen space I did find that working on a...

Micro-Benchmarking Scala Code - The Easy Way

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:55:00 +0100

While evaluating, which of the numerous available Scala JSON implementations to use for spray once again I found myself in need of some tool simplifying the writing of proper JVM benchmarks.
Manually writing benchmarks for the JVM that actually measure what you intend to measure is much harder than it initially appears. There are quite a few rules to keep in mind, even making your hand-written benchmark comply with just half of them requires a lot of attention.

As ever so often other people have already had the same problem and decided to do something about it. In...

Introducing spray - RESTful web services on top of Akka

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:55:00 +0100

For some time now there has been increasing buzz around Akka as “the platform for the next generation event-driven, scalable and fault-tolerant architectures on the JVM” (http://akka.io). With the Akka team recently having released version 1.0 of its product more and more JVM developers (with Scala devs certainly being the majority) are turning to Akka as the enabler for building highly concurrent applications on the JVM with relative ease.

The backbone of Akkas services is its implementation of the actor model, which is often hailed as being the most mature of the several competing actor implementations...

parboiled 0.11.0 released

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:55:00 +0100

Today parboiled, the PEG parsing framework for Java and Scala, received an update to version 0.11.0. You can find the full changelog here.

The main focus of this release has been the improvement of the RecoveringParseRunner, which had a number of unfortunate bugs in the previous release. Error recovery is now a lot more stable, we use it ourselves as the basis for a custom IntelliJ IDEA plugin supporting a rather complex business DSL, which works very nicely.

After having upgraded your dependencies to the new artifacts your migration from 0.10.1 should be no problem, even...

parboiled 0.10.0 released

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:55:00 +0100

Today parboiled, the PEG parsing framework for Java and Scala, received an update to version 0.10.0. You can find the full changelog here.

The main improvements of this release, apart from a number of important bug fixes, are more of the “under-the-hood” type and do not really affect the way you use parboiled. The build system has changed from Ant to Buildr, the codebase has been reorganized and split into 3 modules producing three distinct distribution artifacts (see the installation instructions for more details) and parboiled is now available from the Scala-Tools Releases Maven...

How to make SBT download scala library sources

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 11:55:00 +0100

Being in the process of setting up a new machine for Scala development I once again found myself scratching my head over a question I already faced several times in the past:
How to persuade SBT to automatically download not just the Scala standard library jar for my target Scala version but also the corresponding sources?

Since readily available information about this particular configuration problem still appears to be somewhat scarce I’m writing up this short post mostly for my own reference, but I figure that others might be interested in this too.

First, forget about trying to find some...

The QuickPimp Pattern

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 11:55:00 +0100

Anyone turning to Scala for developing non-trivial applications will come across a number of more or less established Scala Design Patterns. One of the most widely-used ones is the “Pimp my Library” Pattern, which got it’s name from a short article Martin Odersky wrote in October 2006.

This pattern denotes the way in which you can augment (or “pimp”) an existing type with the equivalent of additional members that are not defined in the type itself but in some other place you have control over.

For example, the Scala library pimps the java.lang.String class with a toInt method...

An integrated SBT + IDEA Scala Development Setup

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:55:00 +0100

One of the more discussed topics at the Scala Lift Off in London last week was the Scala development setup favored by the various people. There are quite a few options, preferences depend to a large extend on the individual likings. However, there appeared to be a clear preference for SBT as the build tool of choice and a lot of people use Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA along with its rapidly maturing Scala Plugin for writing Scala code.

So, since documentation on somewhat more complex dev setups involving SBT and IDEA is still somewhat sparse, I decided to...