A programming language itself, while being definitely in the centre of interest, is only one of the components of a programming ecosystem. Another crucial component is tooling — and even given the best programming language out there, productivity might be poor if the tooling isn’t right. Luckily enough, Scala is…

Context functions are one of the new contextual abstractions coming in Scala 3. The release is approaching quickly, the design is finalized, so let’s explore the feature in more detail! If you’d prefer a live-coding video version, see the recent Scala In The City meetup on the same topic. What is a context function? Before…

Shelly — a programming language for drawing — is one of our side-projects that we work on in-between other engagements. It features the challenge mode, where through a series of step-by-step tutorials you can learn both the Shelly language, as well as the basics of programming. There’s also the creative…

The serverless model has a lot of appeal: simple to deploy, simple to scale, no hardware to manage, and no upfront financial commitments. However, we have to realize that using a serverless platform is in fact programming the [Amazon|Google|Microsoft] “virtual machine” which is induced by the myriad of services each…

We can’t trust the data that reaches our servers. We have to make sure that it’s properly formatted, within range, that it references entities that exist in the database, or that the data matches dynamically defined business rules. A wide range of responsibility! That’s why we need data parsers &…

After a long series of RC releases, many planned and unplanned changes, the 3.0.0 release is here. Let’s take a brief look at what’s new & changed. But what is sttp client? It’s the Scala HTTP client that you always wanted! More elaborately, quoting the documentation: sttp client is an open-source library which provides a…

Let’s apply functional programming to a practical problem. Can you guess what it’s going to be? We’ll walk step-by-step through the implementation of a simple web socket application, written using “functional” libraries. All of the code is on GitHub, if you’d like to follow having the code in your favorite…

Tapir is a library for describing HTTP endpoints as immutable values, using a type-safe, composable API. Until recently, tapir’s main functionalities included the ability to describe “regular” REST-like endpoints, and interpret these descriptions as a server, client or OpenAPI documentation. One of the most-voted feature request was web socket support…

Time flies, and before you know it, we have another Java release. In line with the half-year release schedule, it’s time for Java 15, which paves the way for the upcoming Java 17 LTS (a year from now). Java has seen a steady stream of improvements, many of them influenced…