David Pollak

I will discuss the functional programing paradigms that we used to build Buy a Feature , a multi-user, web-based, real-time, serious game. These paradigms include Actors to manage concurrency, event streams as the sole mechanism for gameplay, and various immutable data structures that are composed based on the event streams. I will also briefly touch on the Scala programming language and lift web framework.

I will then discuss the experience of adding new team members to the project, the kind of defects in the application (hint: none are concurrency related), the experience of adding new features, and a general discussion of how well functional paradigms translate into a real-world web application.