Scala Tools & Libraries Wish List

Question

Which tools or libraries do you wish existed in the Scala ecosystem? Are there any existing ones you wish were greatly improved?

Answer 1

• A single lib for time, money and physical units would be cool
• Scala Swing should be more complete (and more consistent)
• Would be nice if the DBC lib for wrapping JDBC access would be finished
• A Scala 3D engine would be awesome. Simplex3D and Sgine are on the way, but it's a long way...

Answer 2

In no particular order:

A Scala version of the Clojure Incanter libraries would be very handy indeed, and could probably be even nicer to use than Clojure's.

It would also be exceptionally cool if the parallel version of the 2.8 collection library had been ready for (todays!) 2.8 release, rather than waiting for 2.8.1. Even cooler would be something with the power and feel of the 2.8 collection library which offloaded calculations to something like Hadoop.

Standard library support for software transactional memory would be very nice.

The IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Scala is an amazing piece of work, but (unsurprisingly) still lags behind Java in some annoying ways, particularly in on-the-fly error reporting.

There need to be some standard shims built so that various "enterprise" libraries (Spring/Hibernate/Ibatis/Freemarker, etc.) can use Scala objects without scattering @BeanProperty annotations around and without using Java collections objects.

Answer 3

I think it is important not to pack too much functionality into Scala. It is really easy to expand Scala on your own, so let's do that for a while. Then, when some framework emerge as a winner, this might shipped with Scala.

For those of you who have suffered the result of the JCP committee, please remember the disasters of premature standardizations.

That said, I have my own wish list :-) I would like a simple DSL for Date. The one from DPPs book would do.

Answer 4

Off the top of my head:

A good scala <-> JDBC bridge. A good mocking framework. Scala wrapper for Spring DI.