Scalac's blog

If you’re looking for the best library to build concurrent and distributed applications, probably sooner than later you’ll come across Akka. It’s a very powerful open source library maintained by Typesafe for making such apps.

Motivation In Scalac we believe that communication is essential in IT and that projects with inefficient information sharing are doomed to fail. Fortunately for us it doesn’t always mean that putting people in one place is the only way. More often it’s about creating the right spirit for exchanging knowledge and providing ways to do […]

At ScalaC we’ve recently started adopting Slick 3.0. If you haven’t tried it yet, hopefully these notes will make the process go smoother.

What is STM? Wikipedia defines it as follows: software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It is an alternative to lock-based synchronization. Hmmm… but what does it mean in practice?

Scala end to end In Scalac we believe that Scala is a great general-purpose language, that helps you to build high-quality software quickly. And although Scala shines in the backend, its use is not limited to server-side programming. With these blog posts, we would also like to convince all of you that it’s possible to […]

Null is evil The concept of Null Reference is sometimes referred to as “The Billion Dollar Mistake”. Such pejorative description has been forged by Sir Anthony Hoare, (you can learn more here) probably most widely known for developing Quicksort, but ironically, also the man who first introduced nulls to ALGOL. But why is null A […]

A lot of dynamic typed languages has function that catch all messages the target object doesn’t have. It gives these languages a lot of power to write DSL. Scala 2.9 introduced an experimental option that enables this sort of dynamic handling of accesses to types in ways that would otherwise fail static type checking. It […]

Scala is well known as a concise, readable programming language. One of the reasons is that many popular libraries offer their users DSLs to work with. These convenient APIs make creating programs simpler by saving our keystrokes and (most importantly) by improving readability. But it’s not always the case … Sometimes we have to work […]

When considering web application development with Scala you probably think about the Play! framework. It’s a great tool for creating fully fledged enterprise grade applications, but creating something big isn’t always necessary. Sometimes you need something easy that allows for fast time-to-market. I stumbled into this problem some time ago when doing prototyping and Skinny saved me […]

Hi. Specs2 is one of the most popular Scala libraries for testing, but definitely not a simple one. That’s why I’ve decided to create a blog post with a few tricks on how to make working with Specs2 much easier. The examples are 100% artificial, but their purpose is only to demonstrate the capabilities of Specs2.