Monday 14 April 2014

Playing with Activator

I've had a bit of time to myself at work recently, so have taken the opportunity to download and try out the latest available technology stack from my department's preferred provider as a test client for some services that I've been developing.

So far I have found Typesafe Activator to be a surprisingly usable rapid prototyping system.

There are a few typos in the documentation and the occasional minor background process failure indicates that it is still a work in progress, but I have managed to develop a simple web application which consumes a JSON/REST web service with about 20 lines of code (excluding imports).

This has been my first time trying to use Scala and Play for anything potentially useful in real life, so I was pleasantly surprised at how productive the development cycle was - within a web browser.

Being able to add some code, see the syntax colouring highlight any newbie errors, trigger a compile and then hit my controller with a request without leaving the browser was borderline fun.

For my current project this stack should be sufficient, but once my Scala confidence gets a bit higher I expect to move on to trying out Akka and Spray.

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