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.

Longevity is Like Hibernate … Except that it’s Not

Longevity is like Hibernate, except that it’s not. The two projects share one major goal: provide persistence support for your domain entities in your enterprise application. But they are more different than same.

While Hibernate is for Java and relational databases, Longevity is for Scala and document databases. Hibernate is also an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM), and longevity is not. Let’s break that down.

Discontinuing the Introducing Emblem Series

It's been a while since my last post in the Introducing Emblem series, and having had some time to mull it over, I've decided to discontinue the series. It seems silly to be writing what is essentially user documentation as a series of blog posts, when I could be writing user documentation in a more suitable place, such as the wiki for the project's GitHub page.

I've migrated the useful content from the previous blog posts into the wiki. I've also added two new wiki pages there, which would otherwise have made up this blog post. In the new pages, I cover TypeBoundMaps, and how to use emblem's maps with types that do not have exactly one type parameter.

I'll put out a note on Twitter or wherever when I add significant new content to the wiki in the future.

Introducing Emblem - TypeKeyMaps

This is the third post in the Introducing Emblem series, where I discuss a reflection-based utility library I have developed called emblem. If you want to try emblem out on your project, follow these instructions. Or read this if you just want to explore try it out in the Scala REPL.

In the previous post, we looked at the core building block of the emblem library: the TypeKey. In this post, we begin to explore the utility of the TypeKey using TypeKeyMaps.

Advancing Enterprise DDD - Moving Forward

In the last essay of the Advancing Enterprise DDD series, we wrapped up our discussion on immutability, as well as the technical discussion overall. In this essay, we wrap up the series by reflecting on what we've learned, and discussing how to apply these lessons as we move forward.

Introducing Emblem - TypeKeys

This is the second post in the Introducing Emblem series, where I discuss a reflection-based utility library I have developed called emblem. The first post presented a high-level overview of the library. In this post, we look at the core building block of the emblem library: the TypeKey.

Introducing Emblem - A Reflection-based Utility Library for Scala

I've been working on this Scala project for a while now, and I found myself needing to develop some reflection-based tools to do some of the things I wanted to do. These things definitely weren't part of my core code, and I thought other people might find them useful as well, so I split them off into a separate library called emblem. It's open-source and on GitHub. The code is clean and has good API docs, but I haven't gotten around to writing any user documentation yet. I plan to do that here, and I'd like to start by describing my basic goals with emblem, and the design principles I decided to follow.