The meeting takes place on May 20th, 2009 at 1900.

I hope to see you there!

Best regards, — Jan.

There will also be a presentation of Scala in Hamburg at the Arbeitskreis Objekttechnologie Norddeutschland.

Both presentations will be held in german.

Please note the following dates for July in your calendar:

• 2009-07-02 – Java Forum Stuttgart 2009
• 2009-07-06 – Arbeitskreis Objekttechnologie Norddeutschland

I hope to see you!

Best regards, — Jan.

Let’s define some base parameters: web application development with the JVM as targeted platform (choose your poison: Java, Scala, …). Here’s my list and some hints on why I think them more worth than one look:

Wicket

Nothings more thought-thru for developing web applications.

iBATIS

There’s a big hype about all those ORMs like Hibernate or EclipseLink. But when it comes to performance, flexibility and easyness, I think iBATIS the better approach. It’s very mature and with the upcoming next major release (a beta will be availabe in Q1 this year hopefully) it’ll gain some Java 5 toys to play with.

Quartz

When in need of scheduling tasks one shouldn’t have to bother on implementing anything else than the tasks. There are few libraries as mature and reliable as well as easy to develop with as this one.

Compass

Built on top of Lucene this library simplifys integrating search into you applications immensely!

TestNG

I think unit tests are overrated when you look at how they’re used in many cases – often it’s just for numbers and not quality testing. Every programmer should and needs to dive a bit deeper into this matter!

I left out other great libraries cause they don’t appear as often in my projects but are nonetheless very valuable. Among these are (for the records): Guice, FreeMarker, JFreeChart, iText, SpringSecurity, Joda Time, LOGBack.

And did I say that all of you should use Scala?!

Best regards, — Jan.

Especially thanks to Cemal for his hospitality!

Here are he slides for all interested: Scala @ London Wicket

Hope to see yo again!

— Jan.

But functional programming was intriguing virgin soil. And the more I approached it, the more was I willing to give the Scala language a chance to prove itself.

A big plus in contrast to other languages on the Java Virtual Machine: Scala not only is functional but also has an object oriented approach! So, for the general Java developer like me there is – for a start – no need to rethink all long evolved concepts and patterns in software development. You just inherit and implement happily as you did before, just the language is another. But then come the moments: “This could be designed differently.” or: “That would perfectly fit a trait (aka implemented interface).”

You get used to the concise syntax of Scala with time, writing goes off hand naturally and the code is much more readable than Java in the end. You’re not dismissed commenting and testing your code with Scala, either. But with the infering type system the source code is much more clearly laid out (bad writing habit can do harm, though).

Enthusiasm can be contagious. I’m going to spread the word and am writing a book on that topic: “Praxis Scala” is the current working title, to be published next midyear at the Hanser Verlag. It will be in German, but who knows, maybe there’ll be a translation of it one day. I’ll focus on the Java developers willing to take a step further and advance in their programming skills. There are quite a few traps and pitfalls one stumbles over when coming from Java – not everyone has to learn it the hard way.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress here, stay tuned!

Scala simply brings back fun to programming!

— Jan.