Book Image

Scala Design Patterns

By : Ivan Nikolov
Book Image

Scala Design Patterns

By: Ivan Nikolov

Overview of this book

Scala has become increasingly popular in many different IT sectors. The language is exceptionally feature-rich which helps developers write less code and get faster results. Design patterns make developer’s lives easier by helping them write great software that is easy to maintain, runs efficiently and is valuable to the company or people concerned. You will learn about the various features of Scala and be able to apply well-known, industry-proven design patterns in your work. The book starts off by focusing on some of the most interesting features of Scala while using practical real-world examples. We will also cover the popular "Gang of Four" design patterns and show you how to incorporate functional patterns effectively. By the end of this book, you will have enough knowledge and understanding to quickly assess problems and come up with elegant solutions.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Scala Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The type class design pattern


A lot of times when we write software, we encounter similarities between different implementations. An important principle of good code design is to avoid repetition and it is known as do not repeat yourself (DRY). There are multiple ways that help us to avoid repetitions—inheritance, generics, and so on.

One way to make sure we do not repeat ourselves is through type classes. The purpose of type classes is to:

Note

Define some behavior in terms of operations that a type must support in order to be considered a member of the type class.

A concrete example would be Numeric. We can say that it is a type class and defines the the operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and so on, for the Int, Double, and such other classes. We have actually already encountered type classes earlier in this book in Chapter 4, Abstract and Self Types. Type classes are the ones that allow us to implement ad-hoc polymorphism.

Type class example

Let's see an actual example that...