Scala Toolkit 0.2.0 is out - Discussion

Announce
1

We are happy to announce that the Scala Toolkit 0.2.0 early release is out. It is an ongoing effort by the Scala organization to make Scala more accessible, lightweight, and fun to use. You can read more about it in the recent blog post on the scala-lang page, and the released series of tutorials.

We ask you to give us feedback and opinions on this effort in this thread. Other places where feedback is welcome are the Scala Toolkit issues tracker and the Scala discord server.

12 Likes
2

Among the functionalities under consideration, we are exploring manipulation of CSV files, SQL database querying, HTTP servers, and logging. Our goal is to create a versatile Toolkit that caters to a wide range of software engineering needs, with a particular emphasis on supporting newcomers, scripting, and prototyping.

Very nice! I’ve really needed this. As a good benchmark of beginner-friendliness I have been porting Python for Everybody to Scala (I started long before the Toolkit was released). It covers files, XML, JSON, SQL and web scraping with Python’s urllib and BeautifulSoup. Os-Lib, uPickle and Sttp are great choices, I had also chosen those. So it would be nice if the Toolkit also came with an SQL library (Slick maybe?), xml and some kind of easy-to-use scraping tool (scala-scraper maybe?) What will you choose for CSV? scala-csv maybe?

Here is a scraping example: Scastie - An interactive playground for Scala.

3 Likes
3

I think that it is great that you are doing this. Perhaps it would be a bit long/complex, but an example on web-app, perhaps based on laminar + CSS (perhaps Bulma) might also be interesting (with some simple data being sent to/from a web server).

2 Likes
4

Another good addition would be to make .par available in the Toolkit for some quick and dirty parallel computations in the REPL or scripts for everyday usage. Currently I can do it with a using directive in Scala-cli but it’s worth considering adding it to the Toolkit, so it can feel like parallel collections are still part of the standard library like they used to be (it would also help students if used in the online courses).

1 Like
5

Agree. You can express your support on the record at Include parallel collections in Toolkit? · Issue #31 · scala/toolkit · GitHub

2 Likes
6

that would be par for the course. Currently, you have to use par for the coursier.

4 Likes