Scala.js: Next generation front end development in Scala

Follow on Twitter: @ochrons, @scala_js

Presented at HelsinkiJS on Nov 4th, 2015

Special thanks to @lihaoyi for inspiration and letting me borrow some slide content :)

[like_nobody]

Awesome job man! Thanks for good work! Scala is my favorite language and I always wanted to use it for frontend too! Keep at good work!

[NickWade-pdx]

Having lived through a prior era of distributed computing - 90's era client/server - the parallels are striking.

The important question to answer is "What's different this time?"

Recall that prior era for a second: "fat clients" (workstations and PCs) and servers both running C/C++, using RPC or CORBA or COM to communicate.

Strong typing! Program to remote interfaces and get marshallers auto generated! Sound familiar yet?

Then there was Java's initial "write once/run everywhere" promise - which didn't quite live up to expectations. (Note I'm talking JDK 1.1 era here).

That whole world crashed and burned - CORBA was so painful that XML over HTTP was considered an improvement and embraced enthusiastically. Think about that for a second.

So what's different this time? Simple - the client can't get out of sync. You literally update the client by hitting refresh on the browser - as opposed to sending IT people around to install the latest version of a client.

It might actually work out this time...

[francknouama]

Very good presentation. I wish it will be longer and show how you debug this type of app. But very interesting so far!

[accumulator]

Very smart presentation, thanks for making things clear!!

Thanks for the great brave talk :-) I've been prototyping with Scala.js and React, I agree completely with you. From the talk, I guess your company is using Scala.js in production, isn't it?

[jatin]

Nice and concise to motivate for scala.js

[mattbram]

How does Scala JS work with AMD frameworks like require.js? Also, what is the capabilities of integrating with frameworks like Kendo, MVVM/Knockout.js, Angular ect? Great talk!

[OlivierLafleur]

I'm curious. What do you use on the server-side?

[muneebwarraich]

in scala we use xml or html ?? can any one can help plz beacause in php i was using html+css for the front end and in scala what we will gonna use ? ? ?

[intuition]

The information about Dart js interop is outdated. Dart 1.13 has now js interop very similar to scala.js. I also don't think it is fair to say Dart is 50% javascript, 50% java. This is only as it comes to syntax. As it comes to semantics it is inspired more by smalltalk. Also many functional style programming features are supported out of the box:

[1, 2, 3]
.map((i) => i + 1)
.where((it) => it < 3)
.forEach(print);

But congrats scala.js. I hope scala.js and Dart community can learn from each other for how to make sure a well designed programming language can be used to build a fast javascript app that can run in the browser.

[yehorsergeenko]

I'm apologize, but all that fancy stuff like Dart, Scala, TS, etc. for people who can't understand how JS works, or coming to Front-end development from Back-end and dragging their ole stuff along.

[JeddAhyoung]

I'm not sure I get this. You've basically recreated Typescript with a "Scala" flavor. The only thing that this actually provides above ES6 or Typescript (or even ES5, really) is immutable structures (which is actually pretty cool) but I'd see no reason for Javascript developers to ever pick this up. Basically, Typescript is used by the Microsoft crowd, and this might be used by the Java crowd. I'd say do yourself a favor and learn ES5 and ES6; from the outset, JS is object-oriented and functional, and it'll take you very far. Don't be afraid. Embrace it.