The new Ann Arbor Scala Enthusiasts group will kick off on January 16, 2013, at 6 pm, as planned. We’re thrilled that Josh Suereth, software developer for Typesafe and author of Scala in Depth, will be speaking at our inaugural meeting. Bruce Eckel, with whom I am co-authoring Atomic Scala, will be attending as well.

Josh will talk about “Functional programming patterns for the Asynchronous Web”:

Asynchronous programming is the latest hype for web development.  Why block a thread on a database query when the CPU could be looking at the next one?   While Asynchronous programming can help improve total throughput on a mult-core machine, the current state of the art lacks common patterns for how to define asynchronous flow.

This talk covers those patterns, from joining together a series of asynchronous operations to chaining a pipeline of asynchronous tasks.  We’ll present a few core abstractions from functional programming that help define asynchronous workflow.  Finally, using these same abstraction, we’ll show how to write unit tests that run synchronously using the same code as the asynchronous workflow.

This talk makes use of Scala 2.10.0’s new Futures and Promises API.

The meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave., Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. That’s at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington in downtown Ann Arbor. The nearest parking structures are 4th & Washington or Library Lane.

Please join us for this free meeting, open to the public, and contribute your ideas for future talks.