Scalac's blog

Futures today Today, when reactive programming is so popular concept, and you can see ‘We’re reactive!’ claim on so many pages that have anything to do with Scala (and not only), Futures are something you have to deal with all the time.

The Problem In my previous post we have written a simple app with Scala.js. In the end we managed to do everything we wanted to, but as we added more and more code a problem appeared – state management, the real app killer. Although our app didn’t do anything advanced, state handling and UI updates forced us […]

What is Scala.js? Scala.js is a compiler that targets JavaScript, unlike the traditional Scala compiler which targets JVM bytecode. What it means in practice – with Scala.js you can write Scala code that will be executed in the browser.

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 […]