2017-06-12

Longevity Release 0.23 - Use Type Classes to Improve Type Safety of Persistent API

This longevity release has been a long time in the making. The main improvement here, and the one that has taken by far the most effort, is instituting the use of type classes to provide type safety for the persistence API. I've done a technical writeup on this work in my previous blog post. It's actually pretty interesting because I've never seen type classes quite this way before, so I think it's worth the read. The TLDR is that the repository API is now fully type safe, and the last instance of forcing users to inherit from a longevity trait has been removed.

Here are some of the other major improvements in this release:

2017-06-09

An Interesting Use for Type Classes in Scala

This is a technical writeup of the major new feature in the longevity 0.23 release.

There are more than enough writeups on using type classes in Scala already. I normally wouldn't bother to write about it, but I will now, for three reasons. First, the usage of type classes in longevity seems unique to me; I haven't seen type classes used quite this way before. Second, I want to write this up as documentation for any future contributors to the longevity project. Third, I'd really like to get your feedback into what I've done here, and hear your advice about how I might further improve on things.