From Zero to Hundred in Four seconds

I thought I throw my grudge out of the window against Scala and try something with it.

I also got my hands on a fairly new book, called: “Learning Scala: Practical Functional Programming for the JVM”. Turns out to be a rather fun book to read. And Jason Swartz has a nice way of writing. So I wanted to play around with Play 2 Framework. It now comes packaged in Activator.

So, I started the long path from almost zero to handle all that. I’m running the latest Ubuntu ( 14 ) and latest Java ( 8 ). The list: Scala, SBT, IntelliJ, Play ( through activator ).

I was pleased that, considering a network which allowed me a download speed of ~1.5MB/s ( that’s byte, not bit ), I was up and running in about 4 minutes. That’s Play running, with a test application created through activator and then imported into an IntelliJ Scala project.

I’m impressed.

I added SBT through the package manager like this:

echo "deb http://dl.bintray.com/sbt/debian /" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sbt.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sbt

It’s really simple.

After that, I did an apt-get on the latest Scala.

I already had IntelliJ.

Activator download took me ~1 minute; then I executed the command to create a test app:

<span class="pln">$ activator new my</span><span class="pun">-</span><span class="pln">first</span><span class="pun">-</span><span class="pln">app play</span><span class="pun">-</span><span class="pln">scala</span>

Simple. Activator downloaded everything my system was still missing.

Then run the start command:

<span class="pln">$ cd my</span><span class="pun">-</span><span class="pln">first</span><span class="pun">-</span><span class="pln">app
$ activator</span>

And you are ready to rock & roll. Importing it in IntelliJ was a blink of an eye.

I’m really impressed with how easy getting started became with these projects and frameworks. I remember a time where I had to configure everything, get tomcat and the whole JVM or Jetty or whatnot, and try to get up and running took half a day at least. Would my internet be faster, I think this would have been even less.

I’ll post more as I go forward.

As always,

Thanks for reading.