Posts tagged "scala"

Top 5 Scala IDEs and Text Editors

November 1, 2021 Comments Off Roxana read

Scala made an amazing march up the TIOBE Index last year, even breaking into the top twenty. It’s no wonder that developers have flocked to Scala: it’s a viable Java replacement that can operate in parallel with Java on the JVM.

Scala has remained relatively steady in recent years. It’s a good functional programming language to get started with. The recent announcement regarding the 2.13 updates and future Dotty releases has piqued the curiosity of developers.

This list is, as usual, a question of personal choice. We can’t possibly include every IDE and text editor available. However, if we’ve missed your favorite Scala IDE, please let us know in the comments!

Here are our top 5 Scala IDEs and text editors!

Eclipse Scala IDE

There is, of course, a Scala extension for Eclipse. What’s the point if there isn’t? This Scala IDE includes support for both pure Scala and hybrid applications. Scala IDE 3.0 includes a slew of new features and functionality for developers, as well as a few major bug fixes.

Code completion, implicit and semantic highlighting, and an all-new indent guide are sophisticated editing options. To make your life simpler, there’s a gleaming Scala debugger, as well as a dependable Junit test finder and an asynchronous debugger.

Ensime

This one is somewhat of a twofer. Emacs and Atom are both text editors with outstanding Scala support, but today we’re focused on the underlying technology that allows this to happen — ENSIME. ENSIME is a free and open-source program that adds Scala and Java IDE-like functionality to your preferred text editor.

ENSIME is not a text editor or an integrated development environment (IDE). To utilize it, you’ll need a build tool, an.ensime file, and a text editor. The build tool downloads the ensime-server, which is then launched via the text editor. While this is a little more complicated than other IDEs, the benefits are substantial.

With implicit expansions, ENSIME offers contextual completion and semantic highlighting. Developers can easily go to source code or documentation. ENSIME allows refactorings and, most crucially, red squiggly lines appear in your code to identify errors and warnings.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA has already appeared on such lists since this competent and ergonomic JVM IDE supports many languages. While this is officially a Java IDE, it also supports many additional languages such as Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, JavaScript, TypeScript, and SQL.

In addition to a slew of functionality, IntelliJ IDEA includes Scala-specific testing assistance with ScalaTest. This enables developers to easily do unit testing. Smart completion, language injection, an editor-centric environment, and many useful build tools are also included.

NetBeans

NetBeans IDE enables developers to create desktop, mobile, and online apps fast and effortlessly. NetBeans IDE makes things easier for developers by providing several capabilities for editing, analyzing, and converting. The project management tool alone is worth investigating.

The Scala NetBeans plugin includes a comprehensive Scala editor with syntax and semantic coloring, an outline navigator, code completion, and other functionality. There’s also a debugger, an interactive console, and Junit and Maven integration.

Vim

Vim, the grand old dame for every developer, is a text editor for developers who wish to completely tailor their own experience. In fact, this is sometimes the biggest issue regarding Vim: developers must install a plethora of plugins in order to truly get the desired environment. However, Vim has a lot of Scala plugins to make it work.

Vim-scala is a nice starting point for managing syntax. Deoplete is a popular code completion plugin. nvim is a framework for asynchronous completion that is driven by the dark. fzf is a single command-line application for Vim that handles Jump to File and Jump to Definition. When all three of these plugins are used together, the Scala experience in Vim becomes truly functional.

Briefly mentioned

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is another Scala choice. For a more precise editing experience, VS Code includes extensions for dozens of languages, including Scala. Sublime Text, a free alternative with various functionality for code editing, markup, and writing, is another option for developers.

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8 Hot Technologies Developed with Scala

October 22, 2021 Comments Off Roxana read

The Scala community has evolved from a mostly academic and research-oriented group, with early champions such as Twitter and Foursquare, to a language that has become a standard for businesses, start-ups, and universities alike.

However, while companies and individuals use Scala to develop their new ideas, they also use other excellent tools such as Play Framework, Akka, Apache Spark, and Kafka…which are not only some of the top trending tools and projects on the market right now, but were also purposefully built-in Scala (for many reasons…).

So, to respect these outstanding Scala-based technologies, we thought we’d spotlight a few favorites.

Big Fast Data and Scala

Although MapReduce has been the officially approved Big Data engine for authoring all compute tasks in Hadoop, its inability to handle event stream processing, a complex API, and current shifts in consumer behavior have sparked interest in alternatives. Scala has dominated the field of “Fast” Data, which some refer to as the next generation of computation engines that focus on the speed of data processing rather than the batch size, and the capacity to handle event streams in real-time. Spark, Scalding, Kafka, and Samza are a few famous instances of this trend that quickly gain recognition and application.

Spark (Apache)

Over the last few years, the Hadoop community has concluded that a comprehensive replacement for MapReduce is required. While MR has been beneficial to the community, it is already a decade old, and the limitations noted above must be addressed. Cloudera, the largest Hadoop provider, formally adopted Apache Spark as the successor in late 2013. The majority of the other Hadoop suppliers have now followed suit.

Simply said, Spark is a high-performance, general-purpose engine for large-scale data processing. It was developed at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab as an alternative to Hadoop’s two-stage MapReduce model. Spark’s fine-grained operators, in-memory caching of intermediate data, and dataflow optimizations boost performance for some workloads up to 100 times quicker. Typesafe is a major Spark enthusiast, and we provide Spark support and training to our clients. Spark streaming is also prevalent, as it meets most event streaming cases’ demands.

Scalding (by Twitter)

Because the Mathematics perspective matches common analytical scenarios, functional programming is a good fit for Big Data. The requirement for a Hadoop API that exposes usable operations and a dataflow processing model prompted Twitter to create Scalding, a Scala API that sits on top of Cascading, which offers a higher-level Java API on top of MapReduce that exposes useful operations and a dataflow processing model. Scalding gives you access to all of Scala’s syntax and functional operations.

Kafka (Apache)

Apache Kafka, a publish-subscribe messaging system reimagined as a distributed commit log, is likewise implemented in Scala and exemplifies the language’s versatility. It is at the heart of Linkedin’s infrastructure, processing hundreds of megabytes of read-write traffic every second from thousands of clients.

Yahoo created and open-sourced a Kafka Manager console, which several of their organizations utilize, including the Media Analytics team. It is developed in Scala as well, with the web console created with the Play Framework. The console interacts with an actor-based, in-memory model created using Akka and Apache Curator behind the scenes.

Apache Samza

Apache Samza is a framework for distributed stream processing. It communicates using Kafka and provides fault tolerance, processor isolation, security, and resource management using Apache Hadoop YARN.

Scala for Performance and Concurrency

Finagle (by Twitter)

Finagle focuses on what is likely Scala’s finest use case: building services with high scalability through concurrency and effective use of system resources. It was created in Scala by our Twitter friends and had Scala and Java idiomatic APIs.

Finagle is a JVM-based extendable RPC system used to build high-concurrency servers. It offers consistent client and server APIs for various protocols and is optimized for performance and concurrency. The majority of Finagle’s code is protocol agnostic, making it easier to add new protocols.

Akka

For Scala’s high concurrency technologies, Akka is a very fast, extremely concurrent framework for developing distributed systems. Akka handles a lot of low-level IO operations and code that used to make web app developers throw up their hands and scream, “just throw more boxes at it.” Typesafe co-founder, CTO, and jazz enthusiast Jonas Bonér created Akka, an essential component of the Typesafe Reactive Platform.

Akka, like Finagle, is developed in Scala and has both Scala and Java APIs.

Other interesting information

ADAM

ADAM is a genomics processing engine and customized file format created with Apache Avro, Apache Spark, and Parquet. Because entire genome files are typically quite big, ADAM assists in crunching petabytes of population data required for rapid analysis, which aids in addressing the life-or-death circumstances that specialists in the area frequently confront.

Lichess

Lichess is a chess hobby program that allows thousands of concurrent chess games on a single server. “It’s a Play application that’s open-source and leverages virtually every single feature that Play offers,” Typesafer Will Sargent says. The majority of the time, it is based on a snapshot build. Not sure how he does it, but it makes for some exciting source code reading.”

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How Scala Can Help Grow Your Business

October 18, 2021 Comments Off Roxana read

What is Scala about that has piqued the interest of software developers? Learn how Scala can help your business in a variety of ways.

Next, programming languages are emerging as the new must-have skills against a background of rapid development in the use of big data, analytics, data science, and the building of websites. Scala is now utilized as one of the most popular programming languages by some of the world’s most prominent websites, including Twitter, eBay, and LinkedIn.

But what is Scala about that has piqued the interest of software development projects? Let’s have a look at how Scala can help your organization in a variety of ways.

What exactly is Scala?

Scala is a programming language built on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) intended to describe programming patterns in a type-safe and concise manner. It is well recognized in the programming industry as an alternative to Python for large data applications. It was designed (in 2003) to solve some of the shortcomings of the ever-popular and ubiquitous Java. As a result, it provides extremely comprehensive yet succinct code. But, how will this convert into commercial advantages?

Why is Scala so popular right now?

According to W3Techs, while ranking lower in terms of popularity and traffic when compared to the most popular programming languages, such as Java, ASP.NET, or PHP, Scala has demonstrated a steady increase in usage over the last year, rising from 1.3 percent in March 2019 to 1.6 percent in March 2020. (in 2015, its usage was only 0.2 percent ). This increase is slightly higher than that indicated by languages such as JavaScript or Python.

On the other hand, Scala is ranked #20 in popularity in the 2019 Developer Survey conducted by The Stack Overflow website. In addition, 58.3 percent of respondents said they “love” working with Scala. Scala is ranked #28 in the March 2020 TIOBE Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages.

Scala’s expansion is closely related to the growing demand for big data projects and the software and people required to execute them. When analyzing data using the popular Apache Spark, a prominent cluster computing framework, it is the language of choice. Spark is utilized in Machine Learning and enables companies with quick, simple data analytics. Companies such as eBay, Netflix, Amazon, Alibaba, Yahoo, and Databricks use Apache Spark for business insights and power their customer-facing products, such as displaying real-time recommendations. When you look behind the scenes at Spark, you’ll notice that Scala is powering more than half of the insights and recommendations.

Remember that Spark is written in Scala, making it more resilient and efficient due to the native connection. Spark is also written in Scala since its syntax is less complicated than Java’s, and its performance is superior to Python and R.

What are Scala’s strengths?

As previously stated, Twitter is a lover of Scala. They went into great detail about its use in a chat with three Twitter developers. One of the points they made was the need to keep their expenses low and the flexibility that the language provides. Scala is popular among programmers because it offers a diverse set of developer tools and blends the strengths of two distinct programming environments.

It combines features of both Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and functional programming languages, utilizing the finest characteristics of each. One fantastic tip to keep in mind is to teach or pass on information about Objects to the team and improve it with notions that use Scala’s functional model. Take the best of both worlds and combine them. As a result, the code will be less prone to errors and will function better and more efficiently, boosting productivity and the overall quality of the development.

The Scala Library Index (Scaladex) is massive, offering programmers access to a vast ecosystem of 175,000+ libraries. It provides a seamless introduction to the realm of functional programming for programmers who are already skilled in Java.

Some people believe it is reasonably simple to write, implying that it is also simpler to build and debug. There are tools or specialized IDEs that improve development productivity, such as Jetbrains or Eclipse. Scala’s usage of static types in complicated applications helps maintain the code bug-free throughout compilation time while simultaneously lowering delivery time due to a lack of mistakes. Because the Scala language utilizes simple syntax, there are generally fewer mistakes overall, especially compared to Java. This also simplifies testing and refactoring. Furthermore, Scala allows you to create high-performance systems by utilizing the JVM as a runtime.

Scala may be a bit more difficult to learn than Python, another high-level language, due to its high-level functionality characteristics. Scala is favored when performance, memory, and safety are important considerations when dealing with big, intensive data processing. It is increasingly excellent for huge projects that need to be scaled beautifully since it provides a high-quality solution while being less prone to errors (hence the name Scala).

What makes Scala perfect for business?

Developers and stakeholders do not always agree on everything, but as any Project Manager will tell you, finding common ground is the foundation of every successful project. Finding common ground where everyone can agree on Scala’s benefits, on the other hand, is a piece of cake. This language has numerous characteristics that make it an obvious winner regardless of where you sit at the table.

Marketing at a faster speed

Scala is popular among programmers because of its efficiency and conciseness, but what does this mean for business stakeholders? If you’re interested in the business side of app development, you’ll be pleased to learn that Scala’s efficient code translates into speed. There are fewer lines to test when the code is clean, efficient, and concise. Testing and development are faster, which is a benefit because it shortens the development cycle and improves time to market.

And, in the future, when new features are introduced, other modifications must be made, or upgrades must be done; this so-called “clean code” will be easier to work with since it generates less technical debt.

An app that is more stable

Hand clutching a mobile phone while coding on a computer

As previously said, a prominent feature of Scala is that it mixes elements of both OOP and functional programming. One of functional programming’s advantages is that it produces code that is more stable and safe than mutable data structures. With the choice of functional programming solutions at their disposal, programmers have a larger, more comprehensive toolset for issue resolution.

All of this contributes to more robust code. Strong code eliminates a wide range of potentially hazardous side effects generated by the unintentional impacts of lesser code forms. Fewer problems mean a more reliable app with less downtime, fewer bugs, and a better overall user experience for stakeholders.

Future-proof apps

Scala is a popular data analytics: around 70% of Scala programmers worked as backend developers in 2019, while approximately 40% worked with analytics. This is due to Scala’s efficiency and characteristics providing the finest concurrency support in libraries like Akka or the well-known library, Play Framework, which is also developed using Scala!

Apps are developing at an incredible speed. Today’s apps are designed to be quicker while also giving greater capabilities and allowing for simpler integration. Take use of Scala’s advantages and benefits to stay one step ahead in app development.

In summary, Scala is popular among programmers, especially those with a solid foundation in Java. Some even say that they are more productive and have more fun at work now that they utilize Scala. While we cannot guarantee that moving to Scala would revive the development teams’ love for programming, we can state that Scala is a very strong language that helps the team and business stakeholders.

After all, if the team is pleased, it is typically a more productive team. We can add this to the list of commercial advantages of adopting Scala to power your next development project, focusing on analytics or web backend.