Monday 17 September 2012

Building Scala apps with Maven and ScalaTest

Of the many Scala projects I know (particularly on Github), most rely on SBT for the build. However, no matter how convenient SBT is, some projects are more easily handled by Maven, even if it is because a lot of the infrastructure require to deploy large projects, is already managed by it.

I personally prefer SBT, in fact, you can use this project for quick Scala + SBT + IDEs setup.  But for the projects I have at work, Maven is used, so I need to have a decent project file.

But as soon as you start trying to build something, you realise that the build systems in Scala still are in beta stages. The amount of options, poor documentation, and conflicting views certainly doesn't help:
SBT (with all its versions), two Maven plugins, Intellij, the ever changing Scala IDE plugin and at least two main testing frameworks, ScalaTest and Specs. Oh, and don't forget Java / Scala mixed projects. It can certainly alienate a newcomer.

In particular, the two maven plugins: maven-scala-plugin, a scala-maven-plugin, have plenty of different posts on how to configure them, most if not all of them at various stages of decay and rot, even though some of this posts are fairly recent. Or what happens a lot of the time, only fragments are posted, usually with old versions referenced.
The project to use should be m2eclipse-scala
Enough with the problems: Here's a simple, complete, and hopefully up to date example (At least at the time of writing):
Use my github project minimal-scala-maven, to make sure the latest version,  otherwise this is also going to decay soon



It's using ScalaTest 2.0.M4 although is not a requirement. ScalaTest is going to be the an umbrella framework, capable of plugging other testing frameworks on top if need be. A Scala IDE plugin is well advanced too, so quite important. Beware, scalatest is supposed to provide a new maven plugin, so stay tuned.

This project should work well with latest 11.1.3 version of Intellij or Scala IDE 2.1 M2 (even tough the maven plugin will complain about lifecycle execution, compiles fine). This last bit I've managed to remove in the past, but I gave up trying to fix every issue. It requires Maven 3.

See some posts for other working approaches with older plugins

Let me know if it works for you, and you have any suggestions on improvement, in particular around Scala IDE.

Saturday 28 April 2012

The JVM finally moving forward

After almost a year of delay, Java 7 has been officially released for the Mac. SeeJava 7 Mac OS X download and README.
In order to use it in Eclipse and others, bear in mind that the PATH is now:
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents
This may be inaccesible to Eclipse, but you can paste the whole line, or create a symlink. It contains the sources, but no Javadocs.
This is a huge milestone, which marks the beginning of the end for Java 6, which was released 6 years ago. Technologies like Scala have soared since. But now with JDK 7 been readily available in all platforms, and with many bugfixes since the original release, it's time to upgrade. Last step will be JDK7u6 when the JRE will be fully availabe. See my previous post on Java 7, 8 and beyond
Update: After running a couple of scripts, I ran into this issue with UnknownHostException in JDK7
See this snippet:

This is my /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
192.168.1.3 loki

Friday 13 April 2012

Java 7, 8 and Beyond

Java 7 update 4 developer preview is available to download from OpenJDK website. Why is this any important? because is the first candidate release of the official JDK released by Oracle since Apple decided to stop shipping a custom build.

This also paves the way for further releases of Java 7 and ultimately Java 8 given the imminent end of life of Java 6.


Are you using Java 7 already? I can see it been similar to Java 5. Few people actually using it, and instead moving directly to Java 8, or feel pushed by it, to move into the last known stable version (in this case, 7).

Java 8 will bring lots of new features making the language a lot closer to what Scala delivers today, and is been heavily influenced by its success. See Simon Ritter's presentation and Fredrik Ohrstrom for more details. Better still... get yourself a build !


See Early Draft of Project Lambda by Brian Goetz. More info on Project Lambda for Java 8
More updates on Lambda, this time is on collections: Brian Goetz update on Streams for Java 8. I particularly like to stress this point on his blog post:
we will pursue an evolutionary strategy of adding extension methods to existing interfaces (such as Collection, List, or Iterable), or perhaps to new interfaces (such as 'Stream') that are retrofitted onto existing classes, enabling many of the desired idioms without making people trade in their trusty ArrayLists and HashMaps. (This is not to say that Java will never have a new Collections framework; clearly there are limitations with the existing Collections framework beyond simply not being designed for lambdas. Creating a new-and-improved collections framework is a fine candidate for consideration in a future version of the JDK.)
Even with Java8, Scala will continue to be ahead of Java, offering a more powerful and complete solution. The large change that was moving from Scala 2.7 to 2.8 in terms of upgrading collections, will have to wait at least until Java 9 to take effect. Because of this, Scala is a technology to stay, and lead the way to a functional revolution.

Good Days to be Scala developer

Next week is Scala Days London 2012, a 2 days marathon with some elite hackers. It's the first time I'm attending and really looking forward to it. The topics on discussion are extremely exciting. Distributed and cloud computing,  functional theory, Akka, Play Framework, Spark, Finagle, and obviously, cool production scenarios and war stories.

Typesafe Stack 2.0 brought so many cool things that takes a lot of time just to catchup, so really interested to attend talks around Akka 2.0 and Play 2.0.

The emphasis that Typesafe and the community are putting on tool support is paying dividends.

SBT has finally become a stable build environment and the community is thriving with an ever growing list of plugins. Intellij IDEA support is great and keeps expanding.

Today Scala 2.9.2 was released together with Scala IDE 2.1 M1, which pack lots of nice features like move refactoring, implicates highlighting, scala debugger and more!. And the roadmap to the final release looks great. This shows how Scala itself has matured, and how the whole ecosystem is taking life on its own.




That provides a lot of confidence not just to developers, but to small and large companies, that are increasingly considering Scala, as evidenced by the growing number of quality scala jobs available.





Exciting Scala Days !!