Scale your efforts with Scala
4The automotive industry is just one of the modern industries making use of Eclipse RCP applications. Working with EMF models that have hundreds of thousands of elements is inevitably challenging for the user, and developing Eclipse plugins to improve that workflow is challenging for developers. At ArcCore, we have been increasingly using Scala for plugin development and we believe that our positive experience should be applicable to other Eclipse developers.
Our talk explains how Scala's features can be leveraged to avoid the pitfalls of object-orientation and to write simpler code than the Java equivalent. We speak from the perspective of our practical experience and the systems we have built with Scala. Uses include complex C code generation, querying and modification of EMF models, data import from external files in various formats into EMF models, and the construction of an Xtext-based DSL that is part of our commercial product.
During the talk, we will showcase some Scala idioms and code snippets that allow us to create more powerful plugins with less code written. We will touch upon the integration of Scala with Java and the usual Eclipse build tools - Maven and Tycho. The audience will find out how Scala features such as case classes, pattern matching, implicit conversions and others result in more robust and maintainable code.
In addition, we will share various practical points of experience we have picked up from using Scala in an industry product - how we prepared developers to use Scala, what our experience has been like with the tooling, and so on.
The talk does not assume prior experience with Scala, although basic Scala knowledge may be useful for some listeners.
About the company: ArcCore is a company based in Sweden that develops AUTOSAR solutions for the automotive market. One of the company's products is Arctic Studio, an Eclipse RCP application for AUTOSAR development.
https://www.eclipsecon.org/france2015/session/scale-your-efforts-scala