December 2007 Blog Posts (9)

Found this awesome sounding creature on my lift explorations:

object User extends User with MetaMegaProtoUser[User, User with KeyedMetaMapper[Long, User]]

Meta Mega Proto User!!

Now… Continue

Another whoa moment today -- ran across a pointed, concise Scala code snippet in Eric Torreborre's announcement of the specs 1.1 testing library...

"a calculator" should {
 "provide an add operation" in {
 "a" | "b" | "result" |>
 1 ! 2 ! 3 |
 5 ! 2 ! 7 |
 3 ! 0 ! 3 | {
 (a: Int, b: Int, result: Int) => { calc.add(a, b) must_== result }
 }
 }
}

The above is a great e… Continue

While trying to get the latest version of the lift web framework (0.3.0) for Scala, I updated to maven 2.0.8, and then per the announcement instructions typed...

mvn archetype:create -U \
-DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb \
-DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-blank \
-DarchetypeVersion=0.3.0 \
-DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases \
-DgroupId=com.test \
-DartifactId… Continue

Watching Scala's development so far, it sure seems like I've seen this before.

It smells like early Ruby on Rails history. A lot of alpha geeks eventually picked up Rails for productive web app development, and fell in love with Ruby along the way.

Scala has a chance of reprising that plot line. It's a fine language. But, an important distinction -- Scala can also play well at an entirely lower level than Ruby.

Sure, just like with Ruby/Rails, you can also write a… Continue

Chalk up one more downside to operator overloading in Scala (and, I presume other languages)... you can't search the interwebs for more information on operators. Google, for example, pretty much ignores punctuation characters.

Let's say you see some Scala code out there like "parallelCoordinator !? ProcessEnd". What does that '!?' mean?

Related, what does '_*' mean in 'x:_*'?

Ouch, Google doesn't know! It's so last millenium -- guess I'll have to do actual linear doc… Continue

forgot to mention: I'm using scala 2.6.1 RC2
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platform details: I'm using java 6 (jdk 6 update 3) for all my experiments here on Scala Base, on Windows Vista. YMMV

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Research Question 1: Is it possible to get Erlang-style process isolation using Scala Actors?

The goal -- I want an isolated Scala Actor (shall we call them Monologuers?) that can't muck around with the state of another Monologuer, except through explicit mailbox messages. Ideally, I'd like to just do this by adding a library, instead of hacking the Scala language, similar to how Actors themselves were introduced into the Scala world.

The answer, doh, seems to be… Continue

just opened up scala base -- let's see how good ning is...
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