Buy a Feature: An Adventure in Immutability and Actors

Speaker: David Pollak, Lift Web FrameworkAbstract: I will discuss the functional programing paradigms that we used to build Buy a Feature, a multi-user, web-based, real-time, serious game. These paradigms include Actors to manage concurrency, event streams as the sole mechanism for gameplay, and various immutable data structures that are composed based on the event streams. I will also briefly touch on the Scala programming language and lift web framework. I will then discuss the experience of adding new team members to the project, the kind of defects in the application (hint: none are concurrency related), the experience of adding new features, and a general discussion of how well functional paradigms translate into a real-world web application. About Bay Area Functional Programmers: BayFP meets monthly with talks on functional programming. Slides and videos from previous talks are available at http://bayfp.org/blog/. The group mailing list is http://groups.google.com/group/bayfp/.