reactive James Roper interview
Recording: reactive James Roper interview
hello everybody I'm Alexa crowborough the organizer for active systems meet up and here we are on location at light Band formerly typesafe that's a company behind ARCA scala play and recently a mysterious system called like all and which will hear about today and we have James Roper with us who is the tech lead on Play Framework and we go yep thank you for having me thanks for having us at your headquarters so uh so I've seen you talk at play framework meetup odd walk so while ago which was about pledge Allah and Allah comas job first so I think I made an assumption that you are the java king of a lot been but just open that's not the case how can you tell us kind of what is your balance of skull in java and how kind of java fits in this whole new strategy full of them okay well Scala is my favorite programming language to work with and I love using it but at the end of the day programming languages don't tend to make or break systems I mean facebook is successful with PHP mm-hmm so if they can be successful with PHP it's it's not about programming languages they'd suddenly can have an impact on on productivity and make you enjoy your work more but um it's at the end of the day it's about architecture and I guess at like then we don't want the programming language to ever get in the way of people being able to solve their problems and so if people are and not looking at the stuff that we're doing because they think scholar is too complex or they're not ready to to make that leap to a new programming language mm-hmm we don't want that to be the case yes other mystical sense ah so I'm you know also a fan of play and I think play was for the first major app which kind of was like Ruby on Rails was call it kind of lifted Scala into mainstream web development and but I've never actually got experience much with the Java set of things although my current company night the former CTO teja bhai actually replies from the whole company on Scott like he started with play in Java all right because he was a gel developer so he's path into that was you know play with Java and then kind of a gray to skull and then use arc and everything else yeah so I just wonder what that side of the market looked like and what does it look like like how much usage you see of playing Java and what is the kind of dynamic do a lot of these people learn Scala I'll do the sequel Java what's the historical experience it's a big mixture so yeah it's it's roughly fifty percent scholar and Java um certainly um I mean that that fairies and it's really hard to know exactly what people are using yes there are some people that use play Java and that's what they stick with and we tend to see particularly the large enterprise companies where they're traditionally java and and they're just not interested in having to do that Reese killing from from java jazz scholar and so they use play java and they stick with the play java and they're happy with play java but then we see a lot of other people let that start with play java and that kind of gives them an itch to learn Scala because they see things done in a bit of a different way with javelin that they're wanting to learn more about it and then they look at the same things done in scholar and they say because it's so accessible because yeah scholar is just there in play and so they want to learn more and that's how they get into scholar through that cool ah so so apparently you know absorb there is probably much more companies using Java in aggregate than scholar and so understand like people want to use occur through java api as well yeah so i wonder how the dynamics played in this decision to kind of do like all gel thirst yep um so there's there's a few things I mean we've been saying that that Java is just important to us as scholar for a number of years but then you know we always produce scholar api's first and often our scholar api's and this has been the case we can play for a while more full-featured than the Java API s mm-hmm so logon gave us an opportunity to actually say no Java is just as important in fact this time we're going to do Java first another thing that we found is that it tended to be our our Java logon is about guiding users to do to write microservices in the right way mm-hmm and it tended to be our Java customers that were asking us more questions about how to get started with with microservices whereas our our scholar customers were tend to be asking us other questions and so we felt that we would get the most value and would get the best feedback early on if we went with Java first mm-hmm you just think so Java guy is basically wanted microservices nervously microservice some well they're really most popular topics I've seen so we did the Scala scarlet up on microservices yeah ah last month and we got a record number like we've had you know researchers son and Jamie Allen actually kind of doing a preview of legume and we had you know full house so apparently microservices is very important so I mean why do guys see them kind of such an important thing like why customers want them like what do we do with them there certainly is a fad expect to to microservices where guys it's the latest hottest thing so that's pepper one to do it which is doesn't mean that micro services are not a good thing just because it's a fad right um I think a lot of companies are finding that you know software is having to become a core competency and they they find that they're having you know just to solve difficult problems particularly scaling problems that their systems need to be resilient and their monoliths are letting them down doing stem on let's are slowing them down in terms of how long it takes them to develop features having really long relations they are unable to keep up with their competition that they're unable to scale to make they demand and so micro surfaces offer a solution to that which is I think why people are so interested in them cool so that's kind of sugars a little bit i am curious you know how folds become interested in individual colleges so you are from Australia originally yeah can I talk about how you got into since color how did you come to type safe now live band and what draw like due to this area I first heard about Scala when I was working at all Sen mmm in fact somebody ran a escala workshop at atlassian and I went to it and it just went completely over my head I didn't understand anything so that actually is where my scaling just stopped there but then I went I spent a year in in Germany in Berlin and I worked for a company that was had a very polyglot stack of micro services and there was a mixture of everything that was PHP Java Scala Python Erlang and and so that is where I started getting my first taste of scholar and and and i really liked what I saw so I started you know introducing little bits of scholar into the scent of the Java services that I was maintaining and then that we also started a project where there were some people who were really interested in play it was what when play 2 was released ok so we started using play two and we're using the Java API but i really liked what I saw with with play and so I started getting involved in the play community and that's where my skull and all I just started really growing oh cool so you actually saw this microservices approach earlier on this this is that's very very interesting because plays used a lot now as actually a headless back-end service with API right so like you can write angular apps yeah against it not until you probably have nice purple day yeah yeah interesting interesting so I know that there are several great developers in Australia using Scala and or regional risk risk on quests there in workflow abandoned his own conductor the resurrector bore you know who I think moved back to Europe Nick the fed the whole bunch okay of this fall so so what is it about kind of Australia and general culture which makes it special google scholar is there any kind of special reason I'm i I'd like to know the answer to that myself I mean they're they're also does australia australian scarlet developers have a reputation to be a certain brand of scholar developers often who are often a bit more pure about functional programming um not all of us i'm definitely not in that category but um it was for some time germany yeah yes um but I yeah I guess some I mean a lot a lot of them do come out of the academic circles so nectar and um and yeah I'm I'd like to know the answer that was done Morris's there right okay yep really high bar for for abstraction yes ah yeah enjoy I'm not just saw like and speaking about conductor right I've seen conductor talk very sexual of all places in Tokyo I have to go to Tokyo to see the air scholar masuri and I was really really impressed and I was surprised there it's not we talked about much here in the bay area because you know as kind of an old developer one sort of control I'd love to be able to do things like this so can I kind of mention how conductor interact with a comb and can what's the idea they are like you can be a developer into all this time I salt so conductor is the default deployment platform in Logan hmm we haven't made log on so that is tied to conduct up but it's it's what we've provided it at least in the first version is this is the way you deploy it mm-hmm so and it's got quite a number of great features to help that I mean the support for our car out of the box we heavily use a clustering in in la gum and developers not having to worry about how there are Kirk lustre gets configured and how the nodes know about each other as it will help okay there I it's it's also you know when you're doing microservices as I said this was really about guiding users in how to do things and so having conductor where it gives you your service locator and service gateway it lets you do the scaling I understand that the most recent relate all very soon they're going to have auto scaling and features like that I think the developers that are that are asking how do I do this really really need that to to to guide them in how to do things so it kind of fits a the our whole narrative for Logan kind of perfectly yes yeah I mean I was very impressed with conductor so I hope you know we could have a whole serious about legume and conductor this meetup right because these Millersville drag the systems and is actually language agnostic so we can talk about deployments we can talk about architectures in a very general way right so this is presenting thanks for coming Thank You Shannon wasn't looking forward to talk alright thanks thank you