Manuel is an independent software consultant with a passion for building web-based systems, both back-end and front-end. He's the author of "Reactive Web Applications with Play" (available through the Manning EAP) and started working with Scala, Akka and Play Framework in 2010 after spending a long time with Java.
He lives in Vienna, where he is co-organiser of the local Scala User Group. He's enthusiastic about the Scala-based technologies and the vibrant community, and is looking for ways to spread its usage in the industry.
Over the past few years, web-applications have started to play an increasingly important role in our lives. We expect them to be always available and the data to be always fresh. This shift into the realm of real-time data processing is now transitioning to physical devices, and Gartner predicts that the Internet of Things will grow to an installed base of 26 billion units by 2020.
Reactive web-applications are an answer to the new requirements of high-availability and resource efficiency brought by this rapid evolution. On the JVM, a set of new languages and tools has emerged that enable the development of entirely asynchronous request and data handling pipelines. At the same time, container-less application frameworks are gaining increasing popularity over traditional deployment mechanisms.
This talk is going to give you an introduction into one of the most trending reactive web-application stack on the JVM, involving the Scala programming language, the concurrency toolkit Akka and the web-application framework Play. It will show you how functional programming techniques enable asynchronous programming, and how those technologies help to build robust and resilient web-applications.