6 ms·

Typesafe acquires Spray.io

74 points by octo_t 13y ago

programminggeek 13y ago
I think it is really interesting how Typesafe is basically acquiring everything good/interesting in the Scala space. It makes for a very different ecosystem than say ruby or clojure or go. I think this is actually a good approach for making Scala something that larger companies will rely on, while benefitting smaller shops and individual developers. Now, if only Typesafe would either build or buy a scala compiler that is as fast as go's. If they did, I would be a scala developer like yesterday.
- glibgil 13y ago
  The most interesting things in the Scala space are at http://typelevel.org http://typelevel.org.
  - tel 13y ago
    The Scala space is somewhat divided, I'd say.
- benmccann 13y ago
  I think that's impossible. One of the reasons Google developed Go was to be able to compile its large code base quickly. Compilation speed was built into the language from the beginning. Meanwhile, Scala continues to add every feature under the sun without a thought to compilation speed. I can't see them removing enough language features to improve compilation speed enough to catch up to Go (although I wish they would).
  - saryant 13y ago
    > I can't see them removing language features to improve compilation speed (although I wish they would). That's why Scala 2.11 removes features from the core compiler. http://docs.scala-lang.org/scala/2.11/ http://docs.scala-lang.org/scala/2.11/
    - ghostdiver 13y ago
      it's a bandaid
- praseodym 13y ago
  I often wonder if Typesafe has lost focus -- take their relatively new Typesafe Activator product bundle. It comes with its own flimsy web-based editor instead of a proper IDE, while Typesafe is investing in the Scala IDE Eclipse plugin at the same time. Same counts for some basics -- library versioning/compatibility in Scala is still a huge mess, and same thing can be said for the compiler's performance (especially combined with an IDE). On the other hand, I do hope the Spray acquisition will improve the Typesafe stack, especially Play: it can really use some of Spray's patterns and its high performance.
kodablah 13y ago
Spray fits nicely in with Akka and I expect HTTP to just become another Akka feature (the way the new IO is, which included assistance from Spray devs IIRC). I wouldn't be surprised to see https://github.com/eligosource/eventsourced https://github.com/eligosource/eventsourced moved into Akka more directly at some point too.
- rit 13y ago
  That is already happening. We are moving Eventsourced into Akka to become "akka-persistence": https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eventsourced/B2Nx4HJB-tA/mbI0PHZpfEQJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eventsourced/B2Nx4HJB-...
memracom 13y ago
Wow! When I started working with Scala, I realized that its actor model was sort of like Erlang, but missing stuff like the supervisor tree which is rather useful. So I looked around, and discovered Akka. Shortly afterwards, Typesafe was formed by merging the groups creating Scala and creating Akka. Then, my company was moving towards a services oriented architecture that used the HTTP api as its core for accessing services. I felt that this was inefficient, especially because you couldn`t do any message queuing or event related stuff without layering it over the top of HTPP`s RPC calls. That seemed counterintutive because fire and forget messaging is a more fundamental construct than RPC. Then I discovered Spray which had already done a lot of the groundwork needed to have an HTTP composition technique for services, plus it even had a more efficient HTTP server to use when you needed to allow for HTTP RPC. And now, Typesafe has joined with Spray. This is making Scala look more and more like THE Java successor. Clojure is still a strong contender, but the Typesafe activities have really pushed Groovy out of the ring, as well as things like JRuby and Jython. I doubt that Java will ever go away, but I can see that Scala and/or Clojure will eventually supercede Java as the main development language for the JVM. And this is important because the JVM is showing signs of moving into the dominant position in the new world of massive multicore. It may never muscle out things like Erlang/Elixir or Python, but it will probably be the core dominant platform of this century.
- ryanobjc 13y ago
  Scala shows a lot of promise for certain. The big challenge to Scala will be Java 8. The basic problem is that Scala is too complex. Having written production code in Scala before, I am unlikely to do so again due to code complexity reasons. And we avoided all the trendy Scala stuff (akka, sbt, DSLs, etc)
  - danieldk 13y ago
    Scala's complexity is a serious problem. I once overheard a conversation between two people (one of them family) who implemented a 'binding' for a distributed key-value store in Scala. One complained that he couldn't even understand the other person's code. The difference: one library treated Scala as a Java with classes, while the other was written in a very functional style using Scalaz. That complexity (or different flavors if you will) has also been a reason for me to stop writing Scala. I don't want to leave behind maintenance hells for whoever has to modify my code in five years. Java may be verbose, but its simplicity (if you avoid the big frameworks) and standardisation (JAX-RS, etc.) does help to keep things understandable and predictable. That said, I do use Akka a lot and like the Typesafe Console. Other than that, I am keeping a distance for now, and put my bets on Java 8 or Kotlin.
tenpoundhammer 13y ago
Typesafe continues to show that they understand the needs of the scala development community. I couldn't be more impressed with their work. Furthermore, their great work basically makes it impossible to work with anything not supported by typesafe, because everything else will eventually become unsupported.

74 points by octo_t 13y ago

I think it is really interesting how Typesafe is basically acquiring everything good/interesting in the Scala space. It makes for a very different ecosystem than say ruby or clojure or go. I think this is actually a good approach for making Scala something that larger companies will rely on, while benefitting smaller shops and individual developers. Now, if only Typesafe would either build or buy a scala compiler that is as fast as go's. If they did, I would be a scala developer like yesterday.

glibgil 13y ago
The most interesting things in the Scala space are at http://typelevel.org http://typelevel.org.
- tel 13y ago
  The Scala space is somewhat divided, I'd say.
benmccann 13y ago
I think that's impossible. One of the reasons Google developed Go was to be able to compile its large code base quickly. Compilation speed was built into the language from the beginning. Meanwhile, Scala continues to add every feature under the sun without a thought to compilation speed. I can't see them removing enough language features to improve compilation speed enough to catch up to Go (although I wish they would).
- saryant 13y ago
  > I can't see them removing language features to improve compilation speed (although I wish they would). That's why Scala 2.11 removes features from the core compiler. http://docs.scala-lang.org/scala/2.11/ http://docs.scala-lang.org/scala/2.11/
  - ghostdiver 13y ago
    it's a bandaid
praseodym 13y ago
I often wonder if Typesafe has lost focus -- take their relatively new Typesafe Activator product bundle. It comes with its own flimsy web-based editor instead of a proper IDE, while Typesafe is investing in the Scala IDE Eclipse plugin at the same time. Same counts for some basics -- library versioning/compatibility in Scala is still a huge mess, and same thing can be said for the compiler's performance (especially combined with an IDE). On the other hand, I do hope the Spray acquisition will improve the Typesafe stack, especially Play: it can really use some of Spray's patterns and its high performance.

kodablah 13y ago

Spray fits nicely in with Akka and I expect HTTP to just become another Akka feature (the way the new IO is, which included assistance from Spray devs IIRC). I wouldn't be surprised to see https://github.com/eligosource/eventsourced https://github.com/eligosource/eventsourced moved into Akka more directly at some point too.

rit 13y ago
That is already happening. We are moving Eventsourced into Akka to become "akka-persistence": https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eventsourced/B2Nx4HJB-tA/mbI0PHZpfEQJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eventsourced/B2Nx4HJB-...

memracom 13y ago

Wow! When I started working with Scala, I realized that its actor model was sort of like Erlang, but missing stuff like the supervisor tree which is rather useful. So I looked around, and discovered Akka. Shortly afterwards, Typesafe was formed by merging the groups creating Scala and creating Akka. Then, my company was moving towards a services oriented architecture that used the HTTP api as its core for accessing services. I felt that this was inefficient, especially because you couldn`t do any message queuing or event related stuff without layering it over the top of HTPP`s RPC calls. That seemed counterintutive because fire and forget messaging is a more fundamental construct than RPC. Then I discovered Spray which had already done a lot of the groundwork needed to have an HTTP composition technique for services, plus it even had a more efficient HTTP server to use when you needed to allow for HTTP RPC. And now, Typesafe has joined with Spray. This is making Scala look more and more like THE Java successor. Clojure is still a strong contender, but the Typesafe activities have really pushed Groovy out of the ring, as well as things like JRuby and Jython. I doubt that Java will ever go away, but I can see that Scala and/or Clojure will eventually supercede Java as the main development language for the JVM. And this is important because the JVM is showing signs of moving into the dominant position in the new world of massive multicore. It may never muscle out things like Erlang/Elixir or Python, but it will probably be the core dominant platform of this century.

ryanobjc 13y ago
Scala shows a lot of promise for certain. The big challenge to Scala will be Java 8. The basic problem is that Scala is too complex. Having written production code in Scala before, I am unlikely to do so again due to code complexity reasons. And we avoided all the trendy Scala stuff (akka, sbt, DSLs, etc)
- danieldk 13y ago
  Scala's complexity is a serious problem. I once overheard a conversation between two people (one of them family) who implemented a 'binding' for a distributed key-value store in Scala. One complained that he couldn't even understand the other person's code. The difference: one library treated Scala as a Java with classes, while the other was written in a very functional style using Scalaz. That complexity (or different flavors if you will) has also been a reason for me to stop writing Scala. I don't want to leave behind maintenance hells for whoever has to modify my code in five years. Java may be verbose, but its simplicity (if you avoid the big frameworks) and standardisation (JAX-RS, etc.) does help to keep things understandable and predictable. That said, I do use Akka a lot and like the Typesafe Console. Other than that, I am keeping a distance for now, and put my bets on Java 8 or Kotlin.

tenpoundhammer 13y ago

Typesafe continues to show that they understand the needs of the scala development community. I couldn't be more impressed with their work. Furthermore, their great work basically makes it impossible to work with anything not supported by typesafe, because everything else will eventually become unsupported.