Of course it's important with IDE support, Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA works great with Scala, so I recommend using them. Eclipse is supposed to get better with the 2.8 release of Scala.
On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 3:03 AM, Alan Kent <[email protected]> wrote: > > Some comments in case interesting. > > My understand of Kilim (and therefore anything built on it) is you have > to annotate every method from the top of the stack down to where you > send/receive messages. Its very common for only the top most method to > need annotations, but I suspect that for more complex apps you may end > up with wanting to send messages (and wait for a result) deeper in the > code tree - maybe even in a library. This would require annotations on > every single message in the call sequence. Yuck. > > I was thinking that as long as you had a somewhat decent API, then the > length of the Actor code itself is not that big an issue. E.g. if the > Java API required twice as much code, is it really a problem? The rest > of the code would almost certainly dominate real world applications. > Looking at the blog post, I must say I personally thought the Scala code > looked the easiest to read. But I don't think that is a reason by > itself to pick Scala over Java for Actors. > > Relying on third party libraries from these various sources is more of > an issue for a real world project. Scala to me has the feeling of a > bigger community. No criticism intended of the other groups developing > Actor frameworks - but I would want to dig into them a bit more to make > sure they would stick around. With for example Kilim doing byte weaving > etc, supporting the code yourself might be non-trivial. > > My very limited work with Actors so far is leading me towards having > lots more actors than I would threads. It seems more natural to break > up big chunks of code into smaller units. This however means reducing > the boilerplate to do actors is more important. > > Over the weekend I tried the Eclipse and Netbeans Scala plugins and gave > up on them both very quickly. I know there is the new plugin for Scala > 2.8 coming that is supposed to be good, but released versions today > amazed me how bad they were. I was trying to open a Scala file with > Java code in it (that I was converting to Scala) - the Eclipse plugin > refused to paste in the text at all, and then for text I did load up I > could not edit parts of the text (could not insert or delete > characters). It really does make you appreciate the quality of the Java > tools that exist. I know people are working hard on the Scala plugins > and don't mean to be negative on their hard work - but it does make you > appreciate the difference in code quality when there is more funding > behind the tool set. > > One thing that is available in Scala Actors that I have not checked for > Java Actors yet is the guard condition support. For a some Actor code I > wrote, guards made the code almost trivial to write. > http://alankent.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/my-first-real-use-of-scala-actors/ > Basically I wanted to read data in from an external data source in > parallel to requests to access the data. Requests should block until > the data was available. Using guards is was easy to leave messages in > the inbox until enough other processing had occurred to allow them to be > answered. Its how easy it was to do that I think make Actors in > languages such as attractive - its so easy to get more concurrent code > going. > > > But bottom line, I don't think its a slam dunk between Scala and Java > for Actors. The quality of the Java development tools compared to Scala > tools (so far) would make me hesitant to introduce Scala here at work as > a core supported language yet. After a weekend of coding, most of my > fears about Scala language complexity are going away. Its not that hard > a language once you get into it. Its more the Scala IDE support and > compiler error messages that are limitations so far for me. > > Alan > > > > -- Viktor Klang Blog: klangism.blogspot.com Twttr: viktorklang Lift Committer - liftweb.com AKKA Committer - akkasource.org Cassidy - github.com/viktorklang/Cassidy.git SoftPub founder: http://groups.google.com/group/softpub --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
