Showing posts with label Play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Play. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a dull Hacker

Play is contagious. But that's not a problem, when the play is a Framework.

http://www.playframework.com/

Play works in both Scala and Java, but you have to be very careful to pick which one you want correctly without mixing/matching, or you'll get into errors. Monday, TheTechnology-Radar-Group had a presentation from Alexandros Bantis on Play with Scala.

Tuesday night, our local Java User's Group got another presentation from Alexandros on  Play with Java.

One question surfaced, which is still being discussed: Given that Grails can easily produce a CRUD application, using Active Record as in Ruby/Rails, is this time-saving capability available in Play, or are they orthogonal approaches? Stay tuned for details!

Two Play sessions, in succession! What a fun month for the Hacker side of ...

the one who remains faithfully,

TheHackerCIO




Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Coding Play Makes it Fun

Coding is always fun and sometimes play. But "Play" is also a framework. It's a fun framework, so Alexandros Bantis demonstrated at last nights Technology Radar Group Meetup.  His hands-on tutorial on the Play Framework and it's Akka messaging infrastructure, was delivered as a GitHub Repo of code demonstrating the use of Play both in Java and Scala.

Theoretical points of interest were how "Actors," "Futures," and "Promises" make life easier for the developer.  The Actors are implemented by a messaging infrastructure -- I gather that this is built into Play, via the Akka package, which is incorporated into Play. Play is a bundle of lots of cool technology into a bundled rapid-development stack. I particularly liked the way Play uses Websockets to monitor the code and incrementally compile it as needed, so that the hacker doesn't need to reboot a server (as with Tomcat, in the bad old days) in order to see his new code changes at work. Just a refresh of the browser and you can see what you have done -- whether it be good, or ill .... :-) In the modern code development world, jRebel is getting built in out of the box!!! And that's a good thing.

Another extremely cool point was how in Play even your HTML get's bound up with Static typecasting. So you can catch all the nasty errors up front even though you're developing client-side display. I'm not quite sure how it works in Java, but in Scala the type of the parameters to be passed seems be combined into a function. And if you pass a faulty type as an argument, low and behold, the browser reveals your type-error.

Finally, the evening was rounded out by a presentation of TechStacker by Rick Parker. A Heroku hosted tool written by a friend, this handy little site is a first stab at creating a crowd-sourced tool for the evaluation of software products. Rick is already using it to do his own evaluations, which are part of his day-job, and I'm certainly going to start putting in materials and experimenting with how Social Networks can be part of software evaluation. I might even go do the Play framework as my first eval on TechStacker! If you want to join in on this, please join in and sign up at http://tech-stacker-staging.herokuapp.com/dashboard

By the way, please don't complain to me about the TechStacker UI. Rick admitted that it's the worst imaginable. But hey, we'er geeks. We'd rather have a command line anyway, right? Who needs GUI?

Thanks to everyone for making the evening enjoyable as well as enlightening.

I remain faithfully,

TheHackerCIO