by Phil Bagwell
Scala Days 2011, coming up in just a few weeks on June 2-3, 2011 at Stanford University, is one of the most exciting Scala community events of the year. Nearly all of the Typesafe team will be there, and we’re eager to connect with a broad subset of the Scala community, old and new. The Scala Days 2011 list of accepted talks and speakers read like a “who’s who” of the Scala world.
Members of the Typesafe staff will be talking about the new version of the Scala IDE for Eclipse and other components of the Typesafe Stack. We’ll tell you what we are doing at Typesafe to make Scala and Akka adoption easier and faster. And you’ll have the chance to tell us what you think we should be doing to make it even easier still.
On May 31 and June 1, the two days preceding the conference, Typesafe will be offering training courses nearby on the Stanford campus. Martin Odersky, Heiko Seeberger and Viktor Klang will be giving introductory and advanced courses on Scala, as well as a fast-track course on Akka. If you or your colleagues want a fast introduction to Scala or Akka, or are starting advanced library design, this is a great opportunity for in-person training from the individuals at the center of the Scala world. Learn more about the courses and register online at the Typesafe web site.
The new Scala parallel collections to support concurrent and parallel processing are easy to use and offer a real boost to performance for many common applications. The designers, Alex, Tiark and I, will be at Scala Days to explain how they work and give tips on how to use them.
Speakers from many of the industry giants will be giving talks on their applications of Scala in commercial settings. The talks are being given by the "movers" who successful took Scala into new applications and are now sharing how it was done. As an attendee, you’ll get to hear what works – and what doesn't – and join the conversation yourself.
On the research side of the agenda, you won’t want to miss the talks on DSLs for heterogeneous computing. Speakers will introduce new concepts in this area, and report on the first practical applications. Already, impressive performance gains are becoming apparent, along with a startling reduction in lines of code. For developers in the multicore world exploring mixed use of CPUs and GPUs to crack big applications, this is the technology to watch. It shows big promise for the future and it is starting to pay off now.
Of course, Stanford is a beautiful and exciting setting for the training courses and conference. We look forward to seeing you there.
