Scala is awesome!

I got caught unawares by Debbie from FuseSource with her video camera and she managed to get me rambling about programming languages and what I thought of Scala.

The sound is a bit quiet you might need to turn it up when Debbie's not talking :)

Here's the video or try it embedded below:

FuseSource has launched!

Rob has explained the background along with Larry's interview and Dana's podcast much better than I could have.

From a personal perspective I'm really excited about the future of FuseSource; we're growing fast, have some amazing customers & a great team including the folks who created Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel and Apache ServiceMix and now we have autonomy so we can stay nimble & fast like a startup while we innovate and iterate to help our customers solve their integration problems with open source; all the while having the security of being backed by a large company. This is gonna be fun! :)

Scalate 1.3 Released

The Scalate team is pleased to announce the availability of Scalate 1.3.

Scalate is a Scala 2.8 based template engine which can be used stand alone, with servlets or web frameworks like JAXRS, Lift or Play or in integration frameworks like Apache Camel.

The following template languages are supported through the same common API:

• Ssp which is like a Scala version of Velocity, JSP or Erb from Rails
• Scaml which is a Scala dialect of Haml for very DRY markup along with theJade syntax
• Mustache which is a Scala dialect of Mustache for logic-less templates which also work inside the browser using mustache.js

All expressions inside Ssp, Scaml and Jade benefit from the full power and expressiveness of Scala plus they are typesafe and checked at edit/compile time to ensure you don't leave any mistakes in your templates.

Scalate 1.3 Highlights

• Jade template syntax is now supported which is a dialect of Haml or Scaml
• New Servlet Filter which allows more flexible mapping of templates in a web application. For example you can have the request /foo.xml automatically bound to /foo.xml.ssp if the template exists letting you easily implement views without requiring a controller or routing in your MVC layer.
• JSP Converter helps you migrate your existing JSP web application across to Scalate
• HTML Converter lets you migrate your existing HTML files easily to Scaml orJade for extra DRY markup
• DRY template imports, values and logic thanks to Scalate Package objects which allow imports, values and methods to be shared across some or all of your templates to reduce noise inside your templates.
• Site Generator lets you generate static or dynamic websites using templates and/or wiki markup together with exporting wiki content from Confluence wikis to migrate to using git/svn as your wiki content repository. You can also use a common bootstrap approach now across both static website generation and web applications - such as to configure wiki macros in a canonical way. We now eat our own dog food and generate this site using Scalate.
• More filters and pipelines supported such as confluence as well as the existing markdown which are particularly useful for website generation (static or semi-static).
• The Scalate Tool now comes with a full interactive shell with full tab completion to make it easier to use the tool either for ad hoc or interactive shell use.

For more detail see the Full Change Log

Feedback is always welcome!