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

Traits as mix-ins


The way we do trait mix-ins is no different than inheriting any class in Scala; the only difference is that you can mix-in more than one trait and for that we have this nice keyword called with. Why do we call it mix-in? We could have called it something else. Well, yes but this explains almost everything you can do with traits. It's easy to modify or add up behaviors to an already existing functionality or construct without affecting already existing behavior. We'll see that in a bit. Traits can be used in a variety of use cases such as:

  • Composable mix-ins; to make already existing interfaces richer
  • Stackable modifications

Traits as composable mix-ins

By composable mix-ins we mean that we can create an instance of a particular type, with mix-ins of a trait, that can have certain additive functionalities. If you're thinking why would we want to do that, then the answer is maybe you want to add some particular behavior that makes sense to your functionality and you want it to...