In this podcast, we sit down with Eugene Yokota, team lead for Lightbend’s Tooling Team, to discuss the new Tech Hub, the decision to say goodbye to Activator, and the new roadmap for the long-awaited sbt 1.0.

We’re changing how developers get started with Lightbend technologies, which unfortunately means that future releases of Play, Akka and Scala will no longer include Activator support as of May 24, 2017, and Lightbend’s Activator server will be decommissioned by the end of 2017.

In April, 2013, we published a blog post about Enterprise Scala Adoption Tips, but the time has come for an update. Not only that, we need to focus on how to help enterprise organizations adopt Scala and also the Typesafe Reactive Platform in general. Many enterprises make the decision to leverage Akka and Play Framework from the Java API, which we fully support.

As more enterprise organizations adopt Scala/Akka/Play, we find it important to help them engage the community effectively. This involves providing them with information about where they can find resources to empower their developers to learn as much about these technologies as possible, as well as to directly engage with the community on a daily basis. By following these steps, the likelihood of successfully adopting these technologies is much higher.

Ten months ago we posted about architectural changes to Typesafe Activator. After a few a lot of yak shaves, side projects, and detours, we have Activator 1.3.0 based on sbt server, a new setup where multiple clients can share the same instance of sbt. sbt server is also available in ABI-stable protocol-stable form for other clients (IDEs, command line, desktop status icon, whatever you can think of) to try out.

In this post, we will go over the dependency management improvements that were added to sbt 0.13.6 and 0.13.7 including:

• Performance improvements with cached resolution
• Eviction warnings
• Unresolved dependency errors

A curious thing. At training events, hackathons and any chance I get I have started asking people what they think of Activator. There are a range of different answers, usually followed by questions once the subject has been broached.

The questions are varied, but over a large enough sample size, surprisingly consistent. It seems that Activator is a fairly misunderstood tool, and it’s not just me who noticed. This blog post will attempt to address those frequently asked questions and even if it doesn’t convince you that Activator is your new best friend, at least you might consider keeping it in your toolbox.

The Issues

A couple weeks ago, while conducting our Scala training course, one of the students who was having some trouble cleaned up his ivy cache and then ran sbt again to test the exercises.

Kip Sigman, one of our awesome trainers at Typesafe, hosts a short webcast on writing unit and integration tests for Scala applications.

We've recently had some questions about Typesafe Activator and how it relates to other projects on the Typesafe Platform, such as Scala, Akka, Play Framework, and sbt. The tool has evolved a lot since we launched it over a year ago, both in use cases and features, and we're continually working on improvements to make it the best way to get started with our technology.

Times are exciting for sbt. With the current push towards 1.0, it will see massive improvements to promote our core tenets of automation, interaction and integration. The two big-hitter features for 1.0 are auto plugins and "sbt as a build server."

Over the coming months, the sbt team will be releasing previews of these features against the current sbt 0.13 codebase.   We hope to elicit feedback as well as promote the new designs, ideals and features before solidifying the sbt 1.0.

The journey of sbt has been marked by a few key decisions which we'll explore in this post: 

1. Use Scala as a build language.
2. Stay reactive and parallel
3. Interaction is as important as automation.