This talk will cover the experience of adopting Scala in the digital enterprise. It will provide technical and development advice to agile teams new to implementing Scala. Learning a new programming language is tough, even if you think that it has similarity to your current day-to-day language and shares the many of the same advantages of it.

Just like Java, Scala is statically typed and compiles to byte codes, it runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Yet Scala has different style, syntax and raison d’etre to Java. Scala enjoys are richer and stronger type system with a powerful inference and implicits engine. In this presentation, we will look at interesting object oriented design patterns and compare them functional equivalents. We will posit the question, why should the modern digital engineer look towards a new language?

Scala has had its fair of criticism and detractors and some of this statements about complexity are valid, but just like a magnetic compass it points the way north to innovation and an attempt to try something different. This presentation will guide through the best practice of introducing this marriage of philosophies. In fact, alternative JVM languages such as Scala and more importantly Groovy forced the Java language architects to eventually add Lambdas to the mother language of Java. We will understand how digital engineers can make the best use of Scala and we will provide some pointed comparisons to the latest features of Java SE 8.