Scala, Play, akka & Much More @ScalaDays

As part of a client project, Tobias attended the ScalaDays in Copenhagen last week. Additionally, he attended a Lightbend meet-up on the topic of Fast Data Platform and the Typelevel Summits, which took place immediately after the ScalaDays. In numbers, Tobias was able to see 25 different talks from speakers from around the world. Overall, a lot of new input in the areas of Scala, akka, Play, and more.

In addition to many topics in the areas of Streaming Data (akka streaming, fast data platform) and Microservices (CQRS, data validation with Cats), the new Scala compiler Dotty was also a major topic at the conference. The discussed improvements are all very promising. In addition to faster compile times, the Scala language itself becomes clearer and, in our view, continues to be strongly improved.

A still relatively new but nevertheless very interesting framework for us is scala meta. The scala meta live coding in the form of an extension for REST APIs was a great example from Pathikrit Bhowmick. In our view, the best talk at the conference came from Gabriele Petronella (“Monad transformers down to earth”). We had not previously encountered such a good explanation of monads in Scala.

Of great interest for our project croGoDeal were also the talks from IBM about Spark, as well as from Salesforce about their platform Einstein and the Spark extension called Optimus Prime. We hope that this type-safe extension of Spark will be released as an open source project in the foreseeable future, so that this excellent tool can also be used outside of Salesforce.

All talks from the conference can be found on the YouTube channel of ScalaDays.