Over the past year and a half I’ve had the great privilege of working with some really amazing people and projects at Typesafe. I’m a huge fan of the Typesafe Platform and I’ve really enjoyed being part of Activator, Play Framework, Akka, Scala, Slick, and the Reactive Manifesto. But at heart I’m a Technology Adventurer who loves to learn and create new things. Now it is time for me to embark on a new adventure at Salesforce.com where I will be helping create something new.

Tonight I will be presenting Going Reactive with Java 8 at the Triangle Java Users Group. Here is the session description:

Java 8’s lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner. Through copious code examples this session will show you how to build event-driven, scalable, resilient, and responsive applications with Java 8, Play Framework and Akka. On the web side you will learn about using lambdas for async & non-blocking requests & WebSockets. You will also learn how the actor model in Akka pairs well with lambdas to create an event-driven foundation that provides concurrency, clustering and fault-tolerance.

This week I will be presenting twice in San Francisco at SF Scala:

• Thursday April 10: Introducing sbt-web - A Node & WebJar Compatible Asset Pipeline for the Typesafe Platform

  sbt-web is a new web asset pipeline for Play Framework and other sbt-based frameworks. It can pull dependencies from both Node and WebJars. The pipeline covers all of the phases of client-side development, including: linting, compiling (CoffeeScript, LESS, etc), minification, concatenation, fingerprinting, and gzipping. This session will give you an introduction to sbt-web and show you how to get started using it.

On Monday March 24th I will be co-presenting a Webinar about Scala and Vaadin. In this Webinar you will learn how to create great looking web UIs with Vaadin and Scala. No prior Scala experience is necessary. We will start with the basics. Hope to see you there!

WebJars were created to work well with Content Deliver Networks (CDNs) and now thanks to jsDelivr there is a great public CDN hosting all of the WebJar assets! jsDelivr is “a free super-fast CDN for developers and webmasters.” What a perfect match for WebJars!

Here is how it works… Just prefix //cdn.jsdelivr.net in front of your WebJar asset URLs. That’s it! For instance, if the URL you setup to jquery.js is /webjars/jquery/2.1.0/jquery.js then to use the jsDelivr CDN the URL would be: //cdn.jsdelivr.net/webjars/jquery/2.1.0/jquery.js

This Thursday (March 20, 2014) I will be presenting Building Reactive Apps at the Reactive Programming Enthusiasts Denver.

Here is the session description:

Non-blocking, asynchronous, and reactive programming models are all the rage today. This session will explore in-depth why these patterns are important in modern apps. We will drill down and see how to apply them to event-driven web, mobile, and RESTful apps. To illustrate the concepts, we will use Java, Scala, Akka, and the Play Framework as examples.

WebJars Locator now has direct support for RequireJS! For a while the WebJars Play helper library has had support for RequireJS which was great but it had a few issues and wasn’t useful outside of Play.

There is now a org.webjars.RequireJS.getSetupJavaScript(String webjarUrlPrefix) method that produces the RequireJS configuration for the WebJars you are using. If you are using only the jQuery WebJar then that JavaScript configuration looks like:

var webjars = {
    versions: { 'requirejs': '2.1.10', 'jquery': '2.1.0' },
    path: function(webjarid, path) {
        return '/webjars/' + webjarid + '/' + webjars.versions[webjarid] + '/' + path;
    }
};

var require = {
    callback: function() {
        // no-op webjars requirejs plugin loader for backwards compatibility
        define('webjars', function () {
            return { load: function (name, req, onload, config) { onload(); } }
        });

        // all of the webjar configs from their webjars-requirejs.js files

        // webjar config for jquery
        requirejs.config({
            paths: { "jquery": webjars.path("jquery", "jquery") },
            shim: { "jquery": { "exports": "$" } }
        });
    }
}

This sets up the paths for RequireJS modules in WebJars and pulls in any other custom configuration from the WebJar’s RequireJS config. To use this setup JavaScript with RequireJS you can add something like the following to your web page:

This week I’ll be circling around North America presenting about Play Framework and Reactive Apps. Here is the lineup:

• Tuesday Feb 11 in Boulder, Colorado at the Boulder JUG:
  6pm - Intro to Play Framework
  7:30pm - Building Reactive Apps
• Wednesday Feb 12 in Dallas, Texas at the Java MUG:
  6:30pm - Building Reactive Apps
• Thursday Feb 13 in Vancouver, BC at the inaugural Vancouver Reactive Programmers meetup:
  7pm - Building Reactive Apps

It is going to be a fun week - I hope to see you at one of these events!

Tomorrow night (Jan 15, 2014) I will be presenting Building Reactive Apps in Boston. There will be lots of live coding and only a couple slides. Hope to see you there!

At Devoxx 2013 Stephen Chin interviewed me on his NightHacking video podcast about Play Framework, Scala, and Reactive. Here is the recording with some live coding fun: