Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Hello world in Akka


For writing our first Akka actor, we need to add the akka-actor library dependency. For dependency management we'll be using SBT and, as we know, we'll be defining these library dependencies in our build.sbt file. To do this, we need to have SBT installed on our system.

Setting up the environment

To get started with a simple Akka project, we can simply follow these steps:

  1. Go to Lightbend's TECH HUB (https://developer.lightbend.com) and click on START A PROJECT:
  1. Search for Akka Quickstart Scala under Akka projects:
  1. Click on CREATE A PROJECT FOR ME!:
  1. Extract the downloaded ZIP (compressed) file.

We can open the extracted folder in IntelliJ IDEA IDE:

  1. Open IntelliJ IDE.
  2. Click on File | New | Project from Existing Sources...:
  1. Choose the build.sbt from the project (akka-quickstart-scala) we've just extracted:
  1. And you get the project open in the IntelliJ window:

This is one way of starting with an Akka project. This project has already defined all the akka-actors specific dependencies...