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

Duck typing


A significant part of the work of a developer is to minimize the amount of code duplication. There are multiple different approaches to do this, including inheritance, abstraction, generics, type classes, and so on. There are cases, however, where strongly typed languages will require some extra work in order to minimize some of the duplication. Let's imagine that we have a method that can read and print the contents of a file. If we have two different libraries that allow us to read a file, in order to use our method, we will have to make sure the methods that read the file somehow become the same type. One way would be by wrapping them in a class that implements a specific interface. Provided that in both the libraries the read method has the same signature, which could easily happen, Scala can use duck typing instead, and this way it will minimize the extra work we will have to do.

Note

Duck typing is a term that comes from dynamic languages and it allows us to treat different...