• Building without the Closed-World Assumption: Integrating Enterprise Build Artifacts using Scala
  Christos KK Loverdos
  
  Working with large-scale enterprise software, like the application and framework stack of a world-class J2EE Application Server, entails the high danger of locking the developer inside the Vendor's ecosystem of tools and processes. Any small deviation might prove painful and with costs the managers are not always willing to accept. Fortunately, a highly expressive, object-functional language like Scala, can hack the escape route; and it can do it so well as to make it the default route.
  What I will present is how I managed to escape the Vendor-provided recipes for intergrating enterprise components at the build level and how this has helped a development team of mostly entry-level juniors not only set a common developer-friendly communication language but also absorb any technological leap from Java 1.4 to Java 1.5 and J2EE 1.4 to J2EE 1.5 specifications.
   
• Migrating a Struts/Java E-Mail Application to Lift/Scala
  Christoph Knabe, Thomas Fiedler
  
  At the Beuth Technical University of Applied Sciences Berlin (BHT) we are using since 2003 a Java web application "teacher news", by which students are e-mailed about important events relating to their teachers. Persons, subscriptions, and messages are stored in a database for web access. We report decisions and experiences in migrating this application to Lift/Scala.
  The topics covered are: The Mapper OR-Mapping framework; Problems in separating user interface from business logic; Comparison with JPA and Hibernate; How to get quickly an application without scaffolding; Configuring Lift by the LiftRules and S objects; The abundance of singleton objects in Lift and its relation to dependency injection; How to do transaction processing with Lift/Mapper; How to do central, and local exception reporting with Lift; How to do URL rewriting; How did we use CometActors to visualize successing, and failing e-mailing; Our tool ScalaSnipper for extracting code snippets for publication.
   
• Lafros GUI-App: a monitoring and control-oriented Scala-Swing application framework
  Rob Dickens
  
  Lafros GUI-App offers a lightweight means of simplifying the task of writing monitoring and control-oriented desktop user interfaces in Scala. It is a complete rewrite of an existing Java framework, JUICe.app, in Scala. The principal facilities provided are, a means to run the same code as either an application or applet, an environment for executing abstract commands, and a specialised label component for displaying values to be monitored. After first relating the software’s development history, the paper describes the facilities provided and how to use them. The benefits of using Scala and GUI-App versus Java and JUICe.app are then considered, including being able to write code which is more concise and declarative in style. Finally, an issue arising from the introduction of dependencies on the Scala libraries is addressed to conclude.
   

Due to space constraints, this session is limited to max 50-60 people.