Steve Vinoski's Blog

I’m a little late in posting this, but in the July/August 2012 issue of Internet Computing, guest columnist Sadek Drobi covers the Play2 framework. Sadek talks about how today’s Web evolutions and the emergence of software as a service and Web services have led to new challenges in programming: distribution, scalability, management of various data formats, stream management, and so on. He explains that Play2 can significantly aid developers in capitalizing on the opportunities the Web offers while minimizing potential risks by leveraging the strengths of functional programming. He outlines functional programming’s power in this context at several levels: data and data format manipulation using higher-order functions; reactive composition with nonblocking I/O for scalability; and reactive stream processing and manipulation using Iteratees with WebSockets and Server-Sent Events. Here’s the PDF of the column.

The same magazine issue is also the “Programmatic Interfaces for Web Applications” special issue that Tomas Vitvar, Cesare Pautausso, and I co-guest-edited. Our guest editors’ introduction explains the purpose of the special issue and introduces the five articles comprising it:

• Toward an Open Cloud Standard by Andy Edmonds, Thijs Metsch, Alexander Papaspyrou, and Alexis Richardson
• ArRESTed Development: Guidelines for Designing REST Frameworks by Ivan Zuzak and Silvia Schreier
• Welcome to the Real World: A Notation for Modeling REST Services by Olga Liskin, Leif Singer, and Kurt Schneider
• Communicating and Displaying Real-Time Data with WebSocket by Victoria Pimentel and Bradford G. Nickerson
• SOAP-Based vs. RESTful Web Services: A Case Study for Multimedia Conferencing by Fatna Belqasmi, Jagdeep Singh, Suhib Younis Bani Melhem, and Roch H. Glitho

For the Sep/Oct 2011 issue of Internet Computing, I am very fortunate to have Dean Wampler as a guest columnist. Dean put together a great column on Scala web frameworks (PDF) in which he looks beyond the venerable Lift and takes a peek into Play, Scalatra, and Finagle.

For the May/June issue of “The Functional Web” column in Internet Computing magazine, I’m fortunate to have David Pollak, creator of the Lift web framework, as a co-author. There’s a fair bit of code in this column, which I always like, and it’s worth looking at just to see how brief but powerful Lift and Scala can be in the hands of a master like David.

As always, feedback welcomed.