Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 7th Jul 2009 13:40 UTC
The Android operating system provides a powerful, open platform for mobile development. It leverages the power of the Java programming language and the Eclipse tools platform. Now you can add the Scala programming language to that mix. In this article, see how you can use Scala as the primary development language on Android.
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Member since:
2009-07-07
Glad you read the article! Scala has a lot of powerful features. However, it is very much an a la carte language. You don't have to use those features. You can write very Java-ish code in Scala, only you will write a lot less of it thanks to type inference, case classes, etc. After awhile you may venture out to using things like closures, multiple inheritance, operator overloading, and pattern matching.
Back to the article... I must disagree with the "exotic" assessment with regards to Scala on Android. Not only do you get all of the basic benefits of Scala over Java, but there are certain aspects of UI development that really benefit from Scala. I gave a couple of examples of this in the article: using a closure to handle a button click event and using pattern matching to handle menu selection events. There are many other things like this. I started an open source project with the purpose of sugaring the Android APIs using Scala: http://code.google.com/p/scala-android/ .