18
Jul 11
Last Wednesday (July 13th, 2011), we had our first Belgium Scala Meetup. It was great to meet such a number of Scala enthusiasts willing to start a small, but vibrant community around Scala and push its adoption here in Belgium.
Some nice ideas have pop-up from this first meetup and some action points were already taken:
- We created a website to publish our activities, pictures, host blogs related with Scala, etc. The website is hosted at www.bescala.org
- We have now a group on LinkedIn called BeScala. Actually a subgroup of the Scala Enthusiasts group. Everybody is welcome to join.
- A Google Groups at http://groups.google.com/group/bescala. Everybody is welcome to join as well. :-)
- A twitter account @be_scala. Of course, everybody is invited to follow! :-)
Our first pictures are available on picasa.
Most important, we are already planing a second meetup right after the vacations (probably second half of August). There are also some companies willing to host the next meetup, which will be great. Having a meetup inside a company will give us a less noisy environment to talk and network (certainly better than in a pub) and we can maybe combine it with a presentation on some topic.
To be continue…
Scala — No comments
6
May 11
Learn different programming language offers us several advantages. Not only allows us to choose the most suitable language for a given task but also lets us discover new ways, new idioms and patterns that we otherwise would not stumble across. Each language has its specificity and its limitations and certain patterns and programming styles will emerge in function of that.
For the MENOS system at Newtec we have a Flex graphical interface and a Java backend. The team consists essentially of Java developers. For this project we all had to learn ActionScript / Flex what pleased the whole team. By analyzing our ActionScript code one can easily see that it was written by Java developers. There is nothing wrong with that and it’s also very common. However, ActionScript offers many other features and maybe we are not fully exploiting its possibilities.
Continue reading →
Programming — 3 comments
8
Apr 11
Scala offers very powerful and advanced features that gives us the means to build very sophisticated and sometimes complex programs. Those same features come in handy also for very simple day-to-day tasks as well.
One of this extras that you can get from Scala is making my unit tests a little bit more elegant. It comes in the form of “Local Functions“. A local function as the name says, is a function defined inside another function or method. And of course it can only be accessed inside the scope in which it was defined.
Have you ever wrote some assert methods in your unit test just to run some more elaborated assertions? I have done it quite a lot. Most of the times they are defined as static methods in utilities classes and are reused in other tests, but in some cases they are so specific to the current test case that it doesn’t make sense to define them separately. For those cases it suffices to define a private method in the test class itself. If you are coding in Scala, you have a third option: define it as a local function in the scope of your current test method.
Continue reading →
Programming / Scala — No comments
