This is a collection of articles I wrote over the years, presently with a strong focus on building reactive systems with Akka.
Published on 19 April 2018
Update 20.04.2018: added Polyglot Maven Scala has a rich ecosystem and active community producing a lot of useful libraries. So much so that, sometimes it is not easy as a newcomer to decide which library to pick for a given task (this is the case for example when it comes to database access and JSON – Read More
Published on 3 January 2018
Building distributed systems is hard. Pesky things like the laws of physics get in the way of maintaining state accross geographically (and chronologically) disparate systems, and, if that weren’t already outrageous enough in itself, those systems may be subject to network failures, forcing us to think about annoying tradeoffs regarding consistency, availability and the meaning – Read More
Published on 13 November 2015
I started using Scala 5 years ago instead of Java after starting (but never quite finishing) to read the first edition of Programming in Scala. First only present in tests, my first attempts at Scala code would quite soon invade small utility classes and before I knew it take over all of my projects. There – Read More
Published on 6 November 2015
Update (18.11.2015): added spray-json-shapeless library Update (06.11.15): added circe library Some time ago I wrote a post on relational database access in Scala since I was looking for a library and there were many of them available, making it hard to make a choice. It turns out that the situation is similar if not worse – Read More
Published on 27 January 2015
TL;DR: Play applications are not automagically performant. I’m writing a book that shows how to use Play correctly, especially when used to working with threaded web-servers such as Tomcat or Jetty. Save 50% with the code mlbernhardt.
Published on 23 April 2014
I’ve been using Akka for 3 years in a variety of projects and by now, I have a hard time imagining to deal with some of the parts of my work without it. Sure, Scala provides other powerful paradigms for dealing with concurrency, but I find Actors to be one of the most elegant concept – Read More
Published on 4 February 2014
Update: Added Squeryl, thanks to @JoeZulli for the heads-up Update 2: Added link to latest Squeryl release for Scala 2.10 and 2.9.2 I recently started working with relational databases again from within Scala, after a while in JSON-land (mostly MongoDB and elasticsearch). During that time, I’d been happily working with lightweight libraries / DSLs that – Read More
Published on 21 December 2013
Two weeks ago, I went to speak about Scala at the Java2Days conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was the 5th edition of the conference, and my first time there. A small group of speakers (to the extent of my knowledge, Josh Long, John Willis and Andrew Lombardi) has been flying overseas every year to attend – Read More
Published on 16 November 2013
Here are the slides from my talk at Devoxx 2013 in Antwerp: The sample application built in the slides is also available on GitHub. Devoxx was great, as always! A huge thank to Stephane and his crew for making it happen, year after year!
Published on 26 October 2013
In part 1 and 2 we’ve seen how to build a completely reactive chain to fetch a large stream of data from a REST API, transform it on the fly and send it over to indexing to ElasticSearch. Now one question remains: does it actually work, and does it help solve a real problem? In – Read More