PDXScala

http://calagator.org/events/1250461638

It's time again for our monthly meeting, once again at our new day and
location! As with last month, we'll once again be meeting at Janrain's
HQ (details are in the Calagator link, but the address is 519 SW 3rd
Ave Suite 600). Topics on the table for this month include: 

• getting started with SBT 0.11.* 
• discussion of actor usage patterns and fault tolerance. 

If you have other topics or presentations you'd like to see included,
please let us know!

I hope to see you all there!

(new and improved date starting this month)

Come join other Scala enthusiasts to talk about all-things Scala related. Whether you're a newcomer or are writing books on the subject, we welcome you. If you're interested in giving a talk or have a talk you'd like someone to give (we'll do our best to find someone qualified), let us know.

We don't have any specific talks lined up yet, but there will be interesting discussions, at the very least. That said, there's still plenty of time to put something together if you do want to give a talk. Just drop a note if you have anything in mind.

A map of Janrain's office location is on Calagator:
http://calagator.org/venues/202392384

I'll give a brief talk about our experiences building Scala code on top of a Clojure framework and some of the trials and tribulations involved in doing so, and Bryan Armstrong will be talk about "Getting back to deterministic resource release by reimplementing 'disposable' semantics and conditionally verifying client code compliance via phantom reference tracking."

Of course, there will also be time for open discussion and questions, possibly even a brief ad-hoc presentation if someone has something they really want to show off.

Come join fellow Scala hackers and enthusiasts. The guest speaker for
this meeting will be Cooper Francis. He's going to cover some of the
tricky changes that came in Scala 2.8 (particularly looking at arrays,
manifests and implicits) and then do a bit of an exposition of
implicits in general and how they can be used to create type classes.
This should be a fun talk and I don't doubt we'll all learn something.
If any of you have already delved into these changes, please come
share your experiences and if you haven't, well... no better time than
Thursday night to learn about them!

Once again, our meeting will be at Jive Software, 915 SW Stark St.,
Suite 400, courtesy of Jesse Hallett, and will be starting at 7PM.

http://calagator.org/events/1250459127

Come join fellow Scala hackers and enthusiasts. The guest speaker for this meeting will be Peat Bakke:

Scala, Circumflex, and MongoDB

Or, why writing everything from scratch is a great way to learn a language, but a terrible way to be productive.

This is about an ongoing Scala project -- a part of the Capacity product planning and resource management system. We'll be looking at a few parts of the system, a homebrew ORM for MongoDB, and the guts behind the scenes that handles the calculations, and the Circumflex-based JSON web service.

The goal of building these from scratch was to learn, and it continues to be an experiment, so I'm looking forward to everyone's feedback on how to make it better!

Just a quick reminder that the PDXScala meet & greet is tonight at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub on Hawthorne, starting at 7PM. I hope to see you all there.

More details are available in the previous post.

Come join PDXScala, the Portland, Oregon Scala users group, for a night of geeking and socializing. We'd like to invite any Scala enthusiasts in town for OSCON and the Scala Summit to come join us at the Lucky Lab Brewpub (http://luckylab.com) located at 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd, just a short hop from the Oregon Convention Center, on Monday, July 19th at 7PM.

If possible, please RSVP here. 

Note for local group members: this event will be in lieu of a July meeting.

http://calagator.org/events/1250458760

Come join us for another gathering of PDXScala, graciously hosted by Jive Software. We'll be meeting at 7PM, June 17th, and Steven Osborn will be talking about his experiences developing for Android using Scala.

Interested in Android Mobile OS development, but want to be able to program in Scala? Well you can have your cake and eat it too. Steven will give a high level overview of the Android development platform along with his experiences using SBT along the SBT Android plugin to rapidly develop Android applications. We'll cover everything from setting up your project, running your hello world application, and testing.

Steven is the CTO of Urban Airship, a local mobile messaging and content deliver company providing easy to use, cross-platform web services for iPhone, Blackberry and Android. With nearly a decade of experience in the industry he has participated in all stages of a software company from startup to acquisition. Steven enjoys participating in open source development and has contributed significant amounts of code to projects, including Android OpenIntents and IDiB (Identity In The Browser). Steven is also an accomplished Guitar Hero rockstar and believes strongly that ideas are worthless and execution is everything.

If you have other topics you'd like to discuss or just want to come hear how others are using Scala, please come join us. There is always plenty of opportunity for open discussions and mini-presentations.

It's that time again! It seems to sneak up on me and if I'm not careful, I'll forget to send these notices out entirely. But fate intervened and I was reminded about it just now, so... without further ado... I'm happy to say we have what looks to be a very interesting talk this month being given by Stephen Judkins. Here's the description in his own words:

GOTO Considered Awesome: Delimited Continuations in Scala

Scala 2.8 adds support for delimited continuations, a powerful control-flow abstraction. First, I'll show how the the impressive power offered by continuations can be used for good or evil.  I will demonstrate how they can be used to implement GOTO in Scala, then I'll show how a simple, synchronous Scala program can be transformed into a distributed, asynchronous web application that could support millions of concurrent users.

I'll explain what a continuation actually is, and how Scala's are "delimited". I'll step though the code transformations the Scala compiler performs in order to support continuations.  I'll show the limitations of Scala's continuation support and how it could be improved. Finally, I'll explain how continuations are a fundamental abstraction upon which many other things can be built.

If you have other topics you'd like to discuss or just want to come hear how others are using Scala, please come join us. There is always plenty of opportunity for open discussions and  mini-presentations.

Jive Software will be, once again, graciously hosting us. Details, including a map, are available here: http://calagator.org/events/1250458266

Come join other Portland, Oregon, Scala enthusiasts at our new location graciously hosted by Jive Software. Anything Scala related is open for discussion. We'll have Jesse Hallett discussing how he put together a lambda calculus to learn about Scala's parsing libraries. Leif Warner will also be showing an application he's been developing which uses the Step web framework (a workalike of the the Sinatra framework in Ruby). This app uses Simple Build Tool, RDF/OWL, graphs and federated queues and is intended to provide an "open source community family tree" of the local Portland-area music scene.

If you have a project or some code you'd like to share (for review or just to look at how you solved an interesting problem) please bring it along. Pizza will be provided by Jive.