Recently, we published a case study with our customer Swisscom, the leading mobile service provider in Switzerland. While the case study focuses more on the solution and implementation details of how Swisscom used Scala and Spark to build a fast data streaming platform from the ground up in just 9 months, there is more to the story. To get a fuller picture, we sat down with Francois Garillot, Big Data Scientist at Swisscom...

August is typically a month filled with vacation, sunburn and the other joys of summer. It's a month where we all take it a bit slower and try to gather more energy for the rest of the year. But it turns out that our amazingly active communities never sleep. And there's been plenty of news and highlights. This Tech Digest is designed to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster. So sit back, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the most important information of last month in a single post.

Welcome to our first Lightbend Tech Digest! It's so exciting to keep finding new places where great technical content is published as our communities continue to grow. Inspired by the amazing efforts of our friends like SoftwareMills' Scala Times, Cake Solutions team blog, the Knoldus blog and many others, we wanted to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster.

Just a couple short years ago, Chris Webster, Associate Fellow at Verizon Communications, was presented with a challenge: how to gain part of the fiercely competitive $40 billion US mobile content market. Working with a new team, a content platform was conceived to provide best-in-class streaming for primetime television, live music and sports. They called it go90, referencing the 90-degree pivot from portrait to landscape mode that many of us use to consume video content...

Recently, at Scala Days New York 2016, I had a chance to sit down with Akara Sucharitakul, Principal Member of Technical Staff at PayPal, and the main force behind PayPal's open source squbs project. Akara had recently published an in-depth article about squbs, describing it as the Reactive way to for PayPal to build, deploy and manage crucial services that have to process billions of transactions per day on as little infrastructure as possible.  

Recently, Lightbend's Deputy CTO, Viktor Klang, was invited to Lund University in southern Sweden to give a seminar about one of his favorite topics: Scala––the programming language, platform, ecosystem and community that he's fortunate to have been a part of for the past nine years.

The Scala Team at Lightbend (formerly Typesafe) is happy to join in announcing the foundation of the Scala Center!

Having a team adopt new technologies and approaches to software development is a daunting task.  New paradigms and unfamiliar ontologies headline the biggest risks to having a team be productive quickly.  Lightbend has a suite of training classes to help you adopt whatever components of Reactive Platform you need to be responsive to you customers by creating resilient and elastic applications.

The Play team is proud to announce the release of Play 2.5.0!  The two major focuses of this release have been streams and Java API feature parity, and for the first time we can say anything that you can do using the Play Scala API, you can also do using the Play Java API.

People love Apache Spark. Typesafe is the official support partner with Databricks, Mesosphere and IBM for Apache Spark. If you’re a Fast Data visionary, then you’re looking for a modern solution to enable your streaming data applications. In today’s DevOps world, you’re looking for a more accessible way to work in particular with Spark Jobs. Instead of directly mingling around with the specific Spark installation, you want to have access to a lot of functions via lightweight protocols remotely. This is the gap that Spark Job Server closes.

If there’s one thing that’s clear this fall, it’s that conference season is in full swing. With Typesafers attending JavaOne in San Francisco, Spark Summit in Amsterdam, W-JAX in Munich, Devoxx in Belgium, YOW in Australia, Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Scala eXchange in London and more popping on our calendars by the minute, our dance card is pretty full. That said, sometimes certain events come up that just catch your eye and you must make time for them.

Andy Petrella at Data Fellas wants you to be productive with your data. This explains why he labored to create Spark Notebook, a fascinating tool that lets you use Apache Spark in your browser and is purposed with creating reproducible analysis using Scala, Apache Spark and other technologies. Spark Notebook offers these capabilities to anybody who needs to play with data, leveraging not only Spark for all data manipulation, but also the Typesafe Reactive Platform, to offer unique power to the user.

After Typesafe migrated both repo.typesafe.com and repo.scala-sbt.org to JFrog Bintray, we requested Artifactory SaaS servers to be shut down. The shutdown resulted in unexpected service interruption on Travis CI's Scala builds and the outage of sbt community repository on July 23, 2015. Travis CI fixed their service interruption by updating its build environment. Typesafe corrected the sbt community repository outage by adding a new redirection service. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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.

With Scala Days 2015 San Francisco just around the corner (and only 15% of tickets left), it has got me thinking quite a bit about how much the ecosystem has expanded since I first became involved with the conference in 2011. 

The rapidly-growing Scala community has evolved from what was largely a very academic and research-oriented crew, with some early champions like Twitter and Foursquare, to a language that’s become a standard for enterprises, start-ups and universities alike. 

But even as companies and individuals use Scala to build their own new ideas, they also utilize other excellent tools like Play Framework, Akka, Apache Spark and Kafka...which are not only some of the hottest tools and projects on the market right now, but also intentionally built in Scala (for many reasons…)

Back in summer of 2014, we launched the results of a survey on Java 8, which shared a lot of information we were looking for, but also contained a small golden nugget of data that we didn’t expect: that out of more than 3000 developers surveyed, a shocking 17% of them reported using Apache Spark in production.

Today, we're proud to share a case study with our customers at BrightTALK, a leading provider of webinars and videos for professionals and their communities. In this piece, Alistair Cairns (VP of Engineering) and Brett Bell (Software Developer) discuss BrightTALK's decision to move away from the company's legacy PHP codebase to the Typesafe Reactive Platform.

(with thanks to Bugs Bunny).

If you are new to Scala, Scaladoc is one of the most useful resources you can use to navigate the unfamiliar waters. Scaladoc has a lot of functionality. Some of the functionality continues to be surprising to newcomers though, hence this article (and screencast).

Our newest case study is with Nitro, a company whose software make it easy to create, edit, share, sign and collaborate with documents—online or offline. In our recent interview, Nitro's VP of Technology, Tihomir Bajic, outlines the importance of Play, Akka and Scala to the company’s product delivery evolution during their recent years of explosive growth. Back in 2011, Nitro had millions of users and a massive code base of C++ for desktop apps for document processing and workflows. Nitro’s desktop products were supported by .NET.

Today we are excited to share a new case study with our friends at Hootsuite, a widely used social media relationship platform. This specific use case focuses on Ow.ly, Hootsuite’s popular URL shortening and click analytics service. Essentially, the tool became so popular and such a critical part of the Hootsuite product, that the the engineering team found themselves dedicating much more time and cost into keeping the service performant and reliable than they expected.

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

This month we are featuring two related Activator Templates of the Month related by purpose but divided by language

Today, we're pleased to announce the open source availability of dbuild, a tool we use within Typesafe to test Scala's ecosystem.  dbuild is a tool which can take a disparate set of projects and compile them against each other, ensuring that modifications to code in one project does not break code in another project.  dbuild was instrumental in the Scala 2.11 release, where it was used to compile and validate more than 70 open source projects, 1.2 million lines of Scala code and 120 thousand lines of Java code.  This helped ensure that our open source ecosystem would have a smooth transition from Scala 2.10 into the 2.11 series.

We're really excited to share the work we've been doing with the team at PredictionIO, a popular open source Machine Learning server that developers use to create “predictive” features in web and mobile applications. Showcased as one of the featured machine learning products on GitHub, PredictionIO 
powers hundreds of applications for its community of more than 5,000 developers. That’s pretty amazing adoption for a product that’s less than two years old.

As readers of the Typesafe newsletter may know, every month we promote an Activator template that embodies qualities we look for in tutorials and topics. This month’s activator template is a return to first principles of Activator as an experimentation and discovery tool. While the selection may be below your level, gentle reader, I will bet as an existing Scala developer, at least someone has asked you at some point how to go about learning Scala from the ground up, or even better, how to go about learning to program.

Typesafe welcomes the work that Miles Sabin and the other Typelevel founders will be undergoing with Typesafe and the rest of the Scala community to improve and enhance the Scala compiler.

Are you interested in getting started with the Typesafe Reactive Platform but don’t know where to begin? Have you heard about Akka and Play Framework, but don’t know if either is right for your application needs? Join us for this three-part webinar series all about Activator, Play, Akka, and our surrounding ecosystem to better understand how all the pieces work together and start building reactive apps with confidence!

In our newest case study, Datazenit, web-based software for database management and administration, share their successes swapping out a Python/Django back end for Scala and Play Framework.

Continuing the series of articles about what some might consider best practices, but what I like to term “things I do that haven’t seemed like a bad idea yet”, this post looks at (very) simple ways to improve your Scala style using the type system, and in particular case classes.

Today, we have some exciting news for anyone interested in building Spark applications with the Typesafe Reactive Platform! 

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.

Today, we were really lucky enough to have John Nestor and Dragos Manolescu from the Whitepages present their experiences converting from
Ruby to Reactive.

Today we’ve published a short white paper (actually it’s blue…), Introducing the Typesafe Reactive Platform. It offers a guide to Typesafe, a map of our ecosystem and additional resources for education and exploration. The aim of the white paper is to familiarize developers, enterprise architects, dev managers, CTOs, and others with Typesafe technologies and how they are used to build Reactive apps.

Our friends at Wix make it possible for everyone to build beautiful, professional websites. They've had amazing success, skyrocketing from 5 million to 50 million users in less than 3 years. It just so happens they're also huge Scala fans! According to our interview with Shai Yallen and Tomer Gabel, Scala and was a better language for future-proofing Wix against massive scale challenges. They've rewritten much of the codebase into Scala, and have a mandadate that all new products be written in Scala.

I started my first Hadoop-based, Big Data projects four years ago. As an experienced Enterprise and Internet developer with a love of Scala, it was frustrating to find that writing Hadoop jobs was hard to do in the tedious, low-level MapReduce API. The powerful, functional programming operations we know and love in Scala’s collections were absent. 

Excited to share our newest case study with the WhitePages team! By replacing Perl and Ruby applications with Scala-based code and an Akka runtime environment, the WhitePages was able to deliver huge improvements in application speed and hardware utilization.

Today, we're excited to share a new case study with Kifi, an innovative startup that is creating a new way to search the Internet and store or share information. 

Today, we're featuring a guest blog by Alexy Khrabrov, one of the organizers of Scala By the Bay. Check out his post below to learn more about this awesome Scala conference!

(Disclaimer: Typesafe is sponsoring this event :) 

Yesterday, the Scala 2.12 road map was published on Scala-Lang.org, so we wanted to spread the good word.

Recently we hosted a Hackathon at Immobilienscout in Berlin to get everyone excited for Scala Days! We’re happy to say it was a huge success! Markus and Lutz teamed up with Berlin's thriving Scala community, encouraging participants to create something special in a short time. 

This week we published a case study with our partners at SoftwareMill. Read how SoftwareMill helped Yap.TV develop a high-performance, resilient and scalable backend with Scala, Akka and Spray.io in "Yap.TV Goes Reactive!"

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.

Today we're excited to announce two new customer success stories, Tomax and Walmart Canada! Both cases support the traction reactive programming has made in the retail and ecommerce space, particularly when paired with Gilt's case study, which we published several months ago. Below is a quick summary of the accounts, we encourage you to read all three case studies to see how Typesafe's technologies are powering a new wave of retail apps!

Show off your skills and help fellow devs get started building Reactive apps by participating in the Go Reactive Activator Competition! This competition will focus on Activator templates that highlight Scala, and winners will be announced at the 5th annual Scala Days conference in Berlin.

Great news everyone! Scala 2.11.0 is here!

Thanks everyone for joining us for yesterday’s webinar, “Welcome to Scala 2.11!”

We launched a store, featuring sweet new designs for Scala, Akka, Play Framework and Activator!  Order swag for meetups, buy gifts for team members, or just show off your Reactive style by wearing a customized shirt or hoodie. We’ll be adding more items periodically, so check back in for new gear. 

We're excited to share a new case study that chronicles how the Huffington Post, a leading online news source, built a new integrated platform to propel them through the next stage of their skyrocketing growth with the Typesafe Reactive Platform. Adam Denenberg, Huffington Post’s VP of Engineering, wanted to prepare for the next wave of users who create thousands of hours of video, billions of Likes, and millions of tweets each day. 

A big thanks to the folks at Coursera for telling their success story in our newest case study, "Making online education accessible with Typesafe." Coursera's popular online education service delivers high quality classes directly to users desktops, and turned the company into an overnight success. Delivering any service in a scalable, seamless manner however, is hard to do without the right tools. Coursera decided to utilize the Typesafe Reactive Platform to handle the massive scale and concurrency issues they faced. 

This in-depth case study outlines how Typesafe helped Viridity Energy, an innovative software platform in the energy market, build an elegant architecture for their enterprise application, VPower. With Scala and Akka, VPower is able to hide the complexity of the energy markets, link customer energy usage and market price data and provide clear, actionable information to its customers that can dramatically reduce their energy costs. 

We're excited to publish our newest case study with HolidayCheck, Germany's largest online travel site and agency. To manage massive scale (30 million monthly visitors!), dynamic cloud and cluster deployments, polyglot persistence and simple API usage, HolidayCheck turned to Typesafe to help architect a solid and reliable foundation that could support their international user base.

Check out our newest case study with CCAD, an organization that helps cable companies worldwide deliver audio/video content to subscribers. A joint venture between Comcast and Arris Group (which acquired Motorola Home), CCAD focuses on the development of future conditional access technologies, and supporting infrastructure deployed among major operators worldwide. 

Last summer we blogged about Takipi, a new tool that gives you visibility into how your Scala code executes in real-time in staging or production. Last month, Takipi wrote their own post about how they Analyzed 30,000 GitHub projects and provided a list of the top 100 libraries in Java, JS and Ruby. This month, they ran the same test with Scala, so we asked them to blog about it. Check out the results below:

Give the gift of Scala this holiday! Atomic Scala, by Bruce Eckel and Diane Marsh, is a fantastic resource for getting started learning the language, especially if you're new to functional programming. Lucky for you, Atomic Scala is offering 50% off for the next 4 days! Purchase your copy today and spread the Scala holiday cheer!

We recently had the chance to sit down with Konrad Malawski, Scala extraordinaire and developer at eBay. We’re always curious how folks get interested and started learning new languages, so we decided to take this opportunity and chat with Konrad about his programming background, current projects and what he likes most about Scala.

Conspire is a robust tool for analyzing email data that gives users detailed analytics about their email network so they can better understand the strengths of their connections. To build a solid foundation for their customer-facing product, they turned to Akka and Scala for scalability, resiliency and simplicity.

When working in a distributed company, tools that easily enable cross-team, low-friction and global collaboration are key to productive communication - something we’ve definitely learned at Typesafe!

Our partner Lunatech is doing a blog series on learning Slick with Play Framework. It is a gentle introduction to getting started, one step at a time, by Peter Hilton, author of Play for Scala.

Sometimes you stumble upon a blog post that so perfectly speaks for your technology that it makes you giddy. That's what happened when our team came accross Ryan Tanner's recent series on Akka at Conspire. The four-part blog post chronicles how a team of three people built a scalable backend with Scala and Akka in just three months- only one of them having used Scala in the past! 

After the very successful collaboration between the Spray and Akka teams: creating the new Akka IO module; we are thrilled to announce that this collaboration has been taken to the next level by merging the Akka and Spray projects—absorbing the awesome capabilities of Spray’s HTTP into Akka. With this, Spray will become a supported part of the Typesafe Reactive Platform.

Our newest case study outlines how Auvik Networks is using the Typesafe Platform to build a radically simple, cloud-managed network automation platform to alleviate pains of computer networking. In the network world, managing an enterprise network can be complex and full of headaches and there are lots of technologies at play – VLAN’s, routes, dynamic routes, ACL’s, etc. Expecting an IT professional to develop a massively distributed system that encompasses hundreds of different nodes with numerous criteria to write all the business logic is an extremely challenging proposition.

Yesterday, the Scala team proudly announced the release of Scala 2.10.3, available for download from scala-lang.org or from Maven Central! This release marks the final in the 2.10.3-RC series, the team and contributors fixing 50 issues since 2.10.2! Since 2.10.3 is strictly a bug-fix release, here’s an brief overview of the most prominent new features and improvements as introduced in 2.10.0...

After Gawker Media made the move to consolidate a previously fragmented infrastructure under a JVM based umbrella, they selected the Typesafe Platform as a natural choice to help manage their extreme scalability requirements. Gawker experiences over 80 million unique page visitors monthly, produces eight original brands with a collective audience of tens of millions of US readers, and has a development team split between the US and Europe- needless to say scale and a robust platform are necessities to help manage growth!

A UK broadcaster required an innovative solution to their increasing business intelligence problem, so they turned to Valtech, a Global Digital Media Agency, to turn their product vision into reality. Always looking for the most suitable and efficient tool for the job, Valtech selected the Typesafe Platform; the combination of a Rapid Application Development web framework, scalability,and interoperability with the Java ecosystem made it a compelling offering. 

Primetalk Speech Portal is a new platform for building spoken dialog systems that delivers flexible and interactive dialogs as a human-computer interface for diverse information systems. The Primetalk team has the ambitious mission to replace the awkward interactive voice response systems (IVR) that are commonplace today, with user-friendly spoken dialog systems (SDS) and they're doing so with Akka and Scala!

47 Degrees is a software development and creative agency focused on the development of native mobile apps and highly scalable back-ends and API’s. In order to meet the unpredictable scaling requirements of their diverse client base, the company decided to switch from Java back-ends based on Spring, to Scala and the Typesfe Platform. The initial choice to adopt Scala was simle for 47 Degrees- being a Java shop, the team knew Scala could allow them to leverage and reuse many of their existing Java libraries and make a gradual migration of their current code bases while boosting developer productivity.

In an effort to deliver a robust system that would enable marketers and advertisers to consistently reach consumers across multiple devices, Tapad selected the Lightbend Platform to accomplish this monumental task. Tapad has proven to be a leader in cross-screen advertising technology, adddressing the new and ever-evolving reality of media consumption on smartphones, tablets and home computers.

In our newest case study, Tindr discusses the future of note taking with Knowtaker, built with the Typesafe Platform. Knowtaker vision is to revolutionize digital note taking by automatically pulling important phrases and reminders out of your notes and placing them front and center in your day-to-day life. 

After Dianne Marsh’s OSCON presentation on Sneaking Scala Through the Back Door, we were eager for her to share those best practices with our community. Before Dianne became Director of Engineering for Cloud Tools at Netflix, she owned a software consulting company and she has been a Scala advocate for some time now (she and Bruce Eckel co-wrote Atomic Scala). Her consulting experience gave her significant opportunity to practice the art of integrating new technology into an organization. Below, she reflects on “Do’s” and “Don’ts” for introducing Scala.

Cake Solutions, an enterprise software solutions provider that architects and implements modern software for organizations, is on the Scala track! Cake aims to be well ahead of the technology curve by constantly evaluating the marketplace for products worthy of inclusion in their portfolio. This method offers Cake Solutions’ clients the very latest technology and equips their businesses with a technical competitive edge. The Typesafe Platform is a perfect example of a modern tool that Cake Solutions implements and uses to offer clients these advantages.

If you want to hire an amazing engineer, you better be sure he or she can write amazing code. This can be a difficult skill to assess, particularly if most of your hiring in an organization is done through an HR department, or you’re looking for a programmer with very specific, new skills for complex projects and programs. Codility tests if engineers write correct and efficient code, a skill you want to evaluate early on in each tech recruitment process. We think it’s a fantastic idea, and Codility recently added Scala tests to their roster of languages, based on demand from some big name companies!

Gilt recently migrated to the Typesafe Platform for their modern e-commerce system.  We’ve written up a case study to capture all the details of why they moved to Play Framework, Akka, and Scala.  We also wanted to get more insight into their architecture and motivations for the switch, so we sat down with their tech team for a short Q&A...

Our newest case study discusses how a company made the switch from Ruby to Scala in order to meet the requirements of their next generation native advertising platform.

Recently James Ward, Developer Advocate at Typesafe, sat down with Bruce Eckel to talk about his new book Atomic Scala and the Scala Summit he is hosting this summer. Here is their conversation...

Our own Jamie Allen recently travelled to South America to spend time with the amazing Typesafe developer community while attending conferences and meetups. He shared an awesome write up of his travels below! Thanks, Jamie for sharing...

Last week the community contributed two new Typesafe Activator templates that are helping developers learn how to build modern web apps with the Typesafe Platform. Matthias Nehlsen's SSE Chat Template with AngularJS template and Jan Machacek's Akka and Spray template are fantastic additions to the growing list of Activator templates.

As the Scala community grows it is very exciting to see the organic development of Scala user groups and conferences. It is always fascinating to hear the stories of how & why the community leaders behind these events got into Scala. With the first Israeli Scala conference, Scalapeño, coming up on July 17th, we wondered what brought Shai Yallinto the point where he exclusively writes Scala and how together with Tomer Gabel, the Israeli Scala user group, Underscore, was established. Here is Shai's story...

At Typesafe we have seen a ton of new Scala developer tools lately. One of the most exciting is Takipi. The core Takipi tool allows you to play "god" in your production Scala code. Recently Takipi released a new tool named Stackifier that deciphers Scala stack traces into a human readable form. Here is a more indepth description of these tools from Takipi...

At Scala Days 2013 Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, explains the reasons why Scala fuses together imperative and functional programming. In his keynote, he makes the case for Scala as a hybrid language that bridges the gap between the imperative / Object Oriented and functional paradigms.

In our most recent case study, simpleBI shares how they're changing the way people view, use and implement Business Intelligence with the Typesafe Platform and Tindr.

Today we're excited to share a new Typesafe case study, courtesy of the folks at Klout! Klout has been the leader in measuring online influence by calculating a user's social impact through extensive data mining.

Our partner VirtusLab, is doing a great deal to spread Scala adoption in Poland and surrounding areas, from providing software solutions that help solve business needs with Typesafe technologies, to launching and supporting ScalaCamp, a cyclic meeting about Scala programming languages and Scala-based projects. Founder Rafa? Pokrywka puts the focus on the business benefits that arise from new technology, and differentiates ScalaCamp from other meetups by zeroing in on innovative and tactical ways companies can use Scala, Akka and Play Framework in the real world.

We all know the newspaper industry has been in a steady transition from print to digital since the web transformed the way readers consume and journalists share news. The Guardian is a UK-based newspaper that has been at the forefront of this transformation, changing from a print-based organization to one that is digital-first in philosophy and practice. Implementing this new strategy has involved a series of bold changes not only to the way they do things, but with the tools and software they used to accomplish these tasks.

On Saturday, March 2nd, four typesafers were invited into the halls of Tokyo Institute of Technology for Scalaconf.jp. The goal of this conference was twofold: first, to promote Scala within the Japanese community, and second to bridge the gap bet...

The Akka API is offered both for Java and Scala users, and most of it is actually reusing the exact same methods - a feat enabled by Scala's carefully crafted Java interoperability. Until now there has been only one tool which could extract API do...

Scala Days 2012, co-sponsored by Typesafe and scheduled for London April 17-18, 2012, is quickly approaching.

Scala Days offers a unique annual opportunity to engage with the Scala community, hear keynote speakers, be exposed to cutting edge research related to Scala, and compare notes about commercial applications of Scala and related frameworks including Akka and Play.

2012 was a big year for the Scala programming language - with monumental releases, adoption by major enterprises and social sites alike and a Scala Days conference that knocked the socks off years past, we'd like to take a quick moment to highlight a few things that address the "why learn Scala" question you may be asking yourself.

Typesafe is very proud to have Rod Johnson on our board of directors but what really gets us excited is when he talks about his use of Scala. Recently Rod did just that when he was interviewed on TechCast #75. We just love it when he says "I'm writing purely in Scala."  In this podcast he talks about why he likes Scala and when Java developers should consider using Scala.  This podcast is only 24 minutes so give it a listen and let us know what you think. Thanks Rod and Chariot Solutions for the awesome TechCast episode!

Cay Horstmann is well known in the Java community as the author of Core Java, "the definitive guide to Java for serious programmers who want to put Java to work on real projects." That's one of the reasons we got excited when we heard that Cay was turning his attention to a Scala book.