Skip to main content

Creating something concrete with Scala

Since I attended a course on functional programming with Scala at Coursera (see previous posts) I've been having a idea to make something concrete with Scala. Having only minimal experience with Scala I decided to try something simple with well known Scala libraries.

The project


First I'll try to create a simple todo application that saves all the data to a some database (maria, redis, mongo) and the tasks are managed via REST-service.

Once I've done that I have two ideas what to do after that. I'll either try to create some sort of UI that uses the REST-service or I'll extend the simple todo application to a Kanban board type of application and try to create the UI after that.

I haven't decided with what I'll be creating the UI since I'm not that familiar with current frontend technologies so that'll be decided later.

First try


At first I tried to create a REST-service with spray but that didn't work. Maybe it's just me but to me the spray documentation was incomplete, I also tried out sprays examples from github and had them running via sbt but not with Scala IDE. The examples ran with sbt but when I tried to create my own REST implementation based on the examples the service never responded. Trying to make this simple service to respond to me with no luck for several hours I decided that I'm not going to use spray.

Second try


This is still on my todo list but next I'll try create the REST-service with Play 2 hopefully with better results.

Impressions now


Trying to create something with a new language and new libraries can be difficult and in case of Scala and spray it seems to be true. Though this isn't true to all languages, I remember a project where we created a REST-service with Grails with absolutely no experience with Groovy or Grails and that was a walk in the park compared to my experiences so far with Scala and spray.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DIY home automation v2

Previously I set up a simple home automation system for controlling outlets at home. So far I've used the system for controlling various lights at our home. I've been satisfied with oulet controlling via browser but I wanted something more.

Objective
I had a idea of temperature and humidity monitoring via Raspberry Pi. I was already browsing for electronics components needed for building a system with sensors but buying single components seemed a bit expensive and I would also have to actually connect all the components to RPi and write the code to read the sensor data.

Mainly because of the price the components I started looking for a pre-built system with the preferred sensors. Almost immediately I came across Proove's sensor that has indoor and outdoor temperature sensors and a indoor humidity sensor. Best part of the pre-built system is that it's already compatible with TellStick system that I used for controlling outlets.

I decided to buy the pre-built sensor syst…
1 comment
Read more

DIY home automation, new generation

I've had my DIY home automation system for controlling outlets and reading sensor data running for about two years now. The system has been working fine and I haven't had any need to touch the code since I added the sensor reading to it, until a few months back.

Need for new functionality
Few months ago I got a new IoT toy for a lend from a friend until I'd get my own toys, a ruuvitag sensor beacon. Ever since I found the ruuvitag for the first time from kickstarter I had the idea of getting a bunch of ruuvitags and adding their weather station sensor readings as part of my home automation system.

The original home automation backend included only tellstick compatible devices and was written in Python, and in my mind it was kind of a hack. The ruuvitag beacons communicate via BLE i.e. Bluetooth Low Energy and that meant that I needed to add functionality to read the beacon data via bluetooth.

I found a ruuvitag Python library and initially thought that I'd just use that a…
1 comment
Read more

Automated browser testing in 2018

Every now and then I do some research on browser testing. More specifically I try to find and evaluate what kind of ready to use solutions or libraries have emerged since my previous research or if some of the previously tested solutions has come up with something new.

Back in September 2017 I had some extra time on my hands and I used a couple of days to see what are the new and interesting solutions at that time. I came across some tools that I have used in the past and found two new interesting options in which one stood out.

Say hello to TestCafe
The most interesting solution that I found was called TestCafe. It's a open source Node.js library from a company called Developer Express Inc. They also have a commercial product called TestCafe (confusing) which I haven't tried as the open source library provided everything I was interested in and it seemed to be under active development.

The thing that caught my interest at first was that this library doesn't depend on WebDri…
3 comments
Read more