Dean Wampler, Object Mentor, Inc.

Dean Wampler, Ph.D., is a Consultant at Object Mentor, Inc., where he helps clients improve their code using Agile methods like Test-Driven Development, Refactoring, and the best combinations of languages and modularity paradigms (so called "polyglot programming"), like Object-Oriented, Aspect-Oriented, and Functional Programming.

Dean is the founder of the advocacy sites http://polyglotprogramming.com and http://aspectprogramming.com. He created the open-source projects "Aquarium", an AOP library for Ruby (http://aquarium.rubyforge.org) and "Contract4J", a Design by Contract library for Java ( http://contract4j.org). He has also contributed to "FitNesse", an acceptance-testing tool for many languages (http://fitnesse.org).

Dean speaks frequently at industry and academic conferences on polyglot programming, AOP, Ruby, and other topics.

Training: "The Seductions of Scala"

Track: Tutorial

Time: Monday 09:00 - 16:00

Location: Olympic

Abstract: Scala is a statically-typed, object-functional hybrid language for the JVM. It has the potential to replace Java as the standard, general-purpose language for programming on the JVM. Even James Gosling has praised Scala.

Why is Scala so compelling? In this tutorial, you will learn how Scala improves on Java with a more powerful object model, full support for Functional Programming (FP) and a more succinct syntax that also promotes creation of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). You will see why FP provides the most robust idioms for writing concurrent software that scales and how FP improves your code in other ways. You get all this and easy interoperability with your legacy Java code base.

We'll do in-class exercises to help you learn these topics.

Prerequisites:
Prior experience with Java or C# will be assumed. Prior functional programming experience won't be necessary. Bring your laptop for the exercises. Before you arrive, install your favorite coding editor, JDK 1.5 or 1.6, and Scala from http://scala-lang.org.