Click here to download:

scaling-web-apps-with-akka-vHotFvgaDFtkrCIuHpbB.zip (284 KB)

There were a couple of things I particularly liked: getting coverage of the various styles of actors available in Scala; and seeing a different development style. I won't be switching back to emacs any time soon, but I do now see the appeal of SBT.

Do go check out the talk: it goes from zero through actors and a
complete Lift web app talking to Akka actors.

Last night I was asked about the aliases I used during my Lift talk.  Here they are...

$ cat ~/.profile
export REBEL_JAR=/Users/richard/Developer/libs/javarebel/jrebel-2.1a/jrebel.jar 
export MAVEN_HOME=/Users/richard/Applications/maven/apache-maven-2.2.1
export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx256M -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dfile.encoding=utf8"
export JAVA_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=utf8"
export PATH=$MAVEN_HOME/bin:$PATH

# E.g., "m package" to run the Maven package target in offline mode:
alias m='mvn -o'


# Run Maven in a mode that fetches sources and documentation for libraries:
alias mm='mvn -DdownloadJavadocs=true -DdownloadSources=true'


# Start your Lift application in the REPL
alias liftconsole='mvn -o scala:console -DmainConsole=LiftConsole'


# Start your Lift application using JRebel
alias mmm='MAVEN_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=utf8 -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Djetty.scanIntervalSeconds=0 -noverify -javaagent:$REBEL_JAR" mvn -o jetty:run'


# Create a new 2.0-M2 Lift application
alias liftcreate="mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb -DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-basic -DarchetypeVersion=2.0-M2 -DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases" 

Yesterday I gave a presentation at lsug.org on "Getting started with Lift".  When I first started looking at Lift I found it quite tricky to grasp what was going on, so I wanted to try to pass on my experiences to help people over any initial humps they may encounter, but also push out to show where you can go with Lift.   So with that in mind, I gave a general overview and then dived in with some live coding.  This turns out to be quite challenging, but with the help of the front row to fix up various errors I made, and the IDE prompting me to fill in some blanks, I just about got there.

You can find the video at Skillsmatter's web site.  You can grab the slides from my talk, but scanning through them a moment ago I noticed that the code I included in the slides and the code I actually typed on the night are quite different.  So I've dumped the code, in the state that it was in at the end of the evening, over on github.

I managed to not mentioned the caveats with the code I was writing, and I missed out a section I was going to do on Box...but... hey, stuff happens. 

The London Scala User Group (which you can learn about at lsug.org) is running a free event every month of the year. Last night Miles gave an introduction to Scala for Java developers, and the slides are available as a PDF. Next month on Feb 8th, Colin is giving examples of re-writing Java classes in Scala and making your code lovely.

On 8th March I'll be doing a "Getting Started with Lift" session, which you can sign up for at the Skillsmatter site.

There's also...

• a Scala day at JAX (22 Feb, with a LSUG.org pub meet after)


• Martin Odersky will be giving a class in June


• A Scala Lift-off event in September


• ...and there will probably be a London Java User Group Unconference at some point which will have a Scala element.