Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Can someone comment on the current state of tooling in the Scala world. Last I had tried (some months back), SBT was extremely slow.

Googling about SBT came back with a lot of complaints about the state of scala tooling back then.

View on HN

I've been using Scala on Android + Intellij IDEA for about the past month after wanting to try something new[1]. Other than having to run it through proguard first, the compile process in Intellij is comparable to how it is with just Java. Scala plays nicely with Android and I have loved using it so far. Makes Android development a bit more fun than with just plain old Java.

[1] https://github.com/yareally/android-scala-intellij-no-sbt-pl...

ah - "Using proguard lets you build Scala without any extra plugins and sbt fiddling".

Seems like the tooling is still one of the more painful aspects of Scala. Kudos to Intellij, -1 to Scala.

Yeah, if I had to manually fiddle around with the SBT build process and manually adding dependencies instead of letting Intellij handle it all, I would be less motivated to want to switch away from Java on Android for sure :).

Excessive configuration to get a new project up in a running is a major demotivator sometimes when you have a new idea and want to just start coding right away.

Do not forget, however, that (for development) you can easily skip the Proguard step if you install the scala libraries on your device directly. Also, setting SBT up is pretty much a one-time thing. Afterwards, you only need to do a few tweaks when starting a new project.

I've used Scala for a couple Android apps in the past... it was great fun to do so! Still, AndroidAnnotations not working with Scala code requires you to rewrite some of their functionality... but you can do that rather easily with Scala's traits etc.

Thanks, I forgot about loading the libraries directly onto my phone for testing. When you say Android Annotations, are you referring to the ones built into java/android (like @TargetApi) or your own custom ones? Just wondering, since I'm about to add ActionBarSherlock to a Scala project and it includes quite a few I'll have to rewrite.

Edit: seems it doesn't like ActionBarSherlock most likely due to that. I get "Error com.actionbarsherlock.R and com.actionbarsherlock.R$xml disgree on InnerClasses attribute"[1].

[1] https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-1167

I don't believe I've used ABS with Scala before. Shouldn't integrating ABS as an apklib solve this issue though?

Regarding AndroidAnnotations: https://github.com/excilys/androidannotations/wiki

I'll try that option. I was just building it into the project as a separate module dependency out of habit from Java, but no real need to do that.

Ahh, I know of that project. Like it quite a bit. Was just confused over the ambiguity of the term "annotations." Thanks for the followup though.

In case you were curious it was a super vague proguard error that turned out to be the issue. Adding

-keepclassmembers class * extends com.actionbarsherlock.ActionBarSherlock { <init>(android.app.Activity, int); }

fixed it. Ugh :/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com