Leaky Monads - An Experiment with Automatic Resource Management
Josh Suereth

This talk covers an experimental library I've been working on for Automatic Resource Management. The goal was to come up with some kind of abstraction that would work across Sockets, File I/O, JDBC, JTA and JNDI/RMI. The library also needed to have configurable methods of obtaining connections, including optional-retry and various execution styles (e.g. threaded). The most interesting aspect was the desire to allow the “managed” monad to automatically “leak” other monads when it is safe to do so. This library makes use of new Scala features found in 2.8 to do so. The talk will cover the basic abstraction, implementation for JNDI/RMI and how to create “leaks” in the monad.