Hacking Scala
Month
In this post I would like to make small introduction to Scaldi and show you how easy it is to use it together with Play. Scaldi is dependency injection library for Scala. It’s very lightweight (without any dependencies) and provides nice Scala DSL for binding dependencies and injecting them. It’s more dynamic approach to do dependency injection in comparison to the cake pattern, because not everything is checked at the compile time. This can be seen as an disadvantage, but I personally believe, that there is place for this approach. It can be vary useful in many circumstances and many people can find it more natural (and easy), especially if they are coming from Java background.
There are only 3 most important traits that you need to know, in order to make dependency injection with Scaldi:
bind and binding. Module also extends Injector trait and implicit Injector instance always available when you are defining your bindingsinject function (so it just provides nice syntax for injecting dependencies). It’s important to understand, that it’s the only the purpose of it. So it completely stateless and knows nothing about actual bindings you have defined in the module. In order to actually find and inject dependencies, inject function always takes an implicit parameter of type InjectorWith introduction of string interpolation in Scala 2.10 we finally got a feature, that many modern languages already have. What made me extremely exited though, is the fact, how good this feature was integrated into the language and how customizable it is. In this post I would like to show you some examples of it. I will not concentrate on explaining how exactly it works, but instead I will show you one very cool application of it, which I found recently. It combines string interpolation with regular expressions. What is especially interesting is the way you can use it in the pattern matching expressions.
It is something that I wanted to be able to make for a long time and actually found one way to implement with type Dynamic. That solution was a little bit crazy and looked like something that you normally will never use in real projects. Now I’m happy to show you solution that is actually looks nice (at least for regular expressions). I also want to notice that things I would like to share with you are shamelessly stolen from (were inspired by) this video introduction to Scala 2.10 features by Adriaan Moors and this answer at StackOverflow by sschaef. I want to thank authors for giving me inspiration and educating me :)