Developing Code, Connecting Industry

Given a need to work towards more scalable systems, and to increase concurrency, many developers working in Java wonder what’s on the other side of the fence.

Languages such as Erlang and Haskell bring the functional programming style to the fore, as they essentially force you to think and write functionally – they simply don’t support (well, at least not easily) doing things in a non-functional fashion very easily.

The mental grinding of gears, however, can be considerable for developers coming from the Java (or C/C++/C#) worlds in many cases, who have become familiar with the Object-oriented paradigm. An excellent solution might be to consider the best of both worlds: Scala.

I had the opportunity this weekend to renew my acquaintance with Scala, and to work on blending it with the old mainstay, Java. Scala runs on the JVM, so as you might expect, it can be combined pretty readily with Java – more cleanly than before, given some new Maven and IDE plugins.

Details and screen shots here…

By: Mike Nash