Programming Scala

Chapter 14. Scala Tools, Libraries, and IDE Support

In the previous chapter, Chapter 13, we looked at how to design scalable applications in Scala. In this chapter, we discuss tools and libraries that are essential for Scala application developers.

We briefly introduced you to the Scala command-line tools in Chapter 1. Now we explore these tools in greater detail and learn about other tools that are essential for the Scala developer. We’ll discuss language-aware plugins for editors and IDEs, testing tools, and various libraries and frameworks. We won’t cover these topics in exhaustive detail, but we will tell you where to look for more information.

Command-Line Tools

Even if you do most of your work with IDEs, understanding how the command-line tools work gives you additional flexibility, as well as a fallback should the graphical tools fail you. In this chapter, we’ll give you some practical advice for interacting with these tools. However, we won’t describe each and every command-line option. For those gory details, we recommend downloading and consulting the tool documentation package scala-devel-docs, as described in For More Information and also in The sbaz Command-Line Tool.

All the command-line tools are installed in the scala-home/bin directory (see Installing Scala).

scalac Command-Line Tool

The scalac command compiles Scala source files, generating JVM class files. In contrast with Java requirements, the source file name doesn’t have to match the public class name in the file. ...