As you probably know, for the past few weeks, we’ve been concentrating hard on Myna. We’ve been accepted onto the Oxygen Accelerator program at Birmingham Science Park, Aston, so we’re hard at work setting up companies, opening bank accounts, and other such menial tasks.

In the land of Untyped, all we can see is myna birds.

In case you haven’t done so already, pop on over to the Myna blog, where you can keep up to date with the latest happenings (and anecdotes from life on Oxygen), or follow the Twitter account. Also note that Myna is still in free beta, so if you’d like to try it out, go ahead and sign up. All feedback is gratefully received – drop us a line via the Myna contact page.

Thanks, and have a great weekend!

The new design is a lot simpler. We’ve combined the main page with our new portfolio and given each project its own distinctive look and feel. For example, the section for Myna mimics mynaweb.com, and the section on the Urban River Survey is based on the map of survey data around London*.

We should also give another round of thanks to Si Hammond, who came out with us to photograph our beloved Royal typewriter mascot against various Birmingham-based backdrops. We’ve got such mileage out of these photographs – they lend real character!

Cliff’s plugin lets you test and optimise the content of your WordPress posts and pages. Why not try it on your web site?

Bigtop is a collection of libraries for web developers. Included in the first beta release are:

• Bigtop Routes – a library for creating type-safe bidirectional mappings between URLs and Scala code;
• Bigtop Core – a library for generating and manipulating URLs and hyperlinks in a functional style.

Routes uses the HList-based approach to bidirectional pattern matching that Dave presented at Scala Lift-Off London 2011. There are versions of the library for use with Lift, Scalatra, and plain old Java servlets.

Check the Bigtop web site for a getting started guide, API documentation, and links to the code and Maven repository.

The mappings between URLs and code form an integral part of any web application. Many web frameworks help map from URLs to code, but the reverse mapping is often neglected, leaving developers to construct URLs via haphazard string manipulation. Furthermore, many frameworks do not match URLs in a type-safe manner.

Scala provides all the tools we need to address this problem in a more comprehensive manner. In this talk we will walk through the creation of Bigtop Routes, a bidirectional mapping library that is both type-safe and developer-friendly. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which Scala language features, such as flexible syntax, implicit conversions, and a touch of type-level programming, help to simplify the task at hand.

The slides and code samples are all available from my Github page. Skills Matter have posted a video of the talk on their web site.

For this session we’re going to hack on Opa. Normally we read through a paper, but we think hacking will work better over the medium. The goal is not (necessarily) to write something useful in Opa but rather to understand it’s model for web development. We’re not seeking to advocate Opa, nor are we experts on the language.

As G+ doesn’t yet support organisations, get in touch with me (email noel at untyped, or message Noel Welsh on G+) and ask to be my UU circle. We’ll be online on Friday 9 Sept from 13:37PM (+1 GMT), and will invite everyone in the circle to the hangout. See you there!

Twelve thousand hits, some thirty emails, and over a dozen new beta testers. That’s what happened when a blog post of ours spent ten hours on the Hacker News frontpage. It was definitely fun getting all that attention, despite the rush of traffic taking our little server off the web for a while. (Installing WP-Cache brought it back.)

Myna is the system described in the blog post, and we’re accepting beta users right now. If you’re interested in content optimisation on your website, and want better results than A/B testing will deliver, do take a look. Obviously getting this surge of traffic from HN is incredibly valuable to us. However I don’t have any suggestions for repeating the event: when I submitted the blog post to HN some months ago it disappeared without a trace. Certainly being active answering questions on HN helped keep it on the front page, and that position netted us a fairly steady thousand hits an hour.

If you’re one of the people who read our blog post, thanks for the interest! It’s very exciting for us to know that our idea for improving content optimisation resonates with so many people, and we’re looking forward to getting Myna out of beta and seeing where it takes us.

Scala has a pretty flexible syntax (although not as flexible as Racket’s, of course) that makes it popular amongst proponents of DSLs. Not all DSLs have to be serious, however, as I’m about to prove.

First up is Noel’s original concept – proof of his love for DSLs, expressed in purest code:

 class A(num: Int) { def Scala = "It's s" + ("o" * num) + " much fun!" } object I { def <(num: Int) = new A(num) } I <3 Scala // ==> "It's sooo much fun!" 

Second is a simpler work that I call “The Startled Lolcat”:

 object O { def o = "What has been seen, cannot be unseen." } O.o // ==> "What has been seen, cannot be unseen."

The brief was to implement an elegant online phone configuration system. Alex, Director at Loho, provided the vision. We provided two weeks of development time, which was enough to create a working prototype. Alex has asked us to not give away too many details about the system, but I can show you a few screenshots. First up, here’s the main screen:

The very stylish main menu of the VoIP administration tool we’ve built for Loho.

Doesn’t give away much, does it? A bit more interesting is a detail of editing a configuration:

Also very stylish: editing the configuration of a voice menu

Here I’m editing a voice menu — one of those “Press 1 if you’re interested in giving us all your money” type things.

We think we’ve created a very nice system. Loho tell us they were overwhelmed with interest at a recent tradefair, suggesting we’re not alone in our opinion. While the interface is an important aspect of the work, the backend (which I can talk about!) is just as important. The main task was defining a data model to capture the rich feature set that Loho provide. This turned out to be very similar to designing a programming language and its intermediate representation. For example, we use a continuation-passing style representation to avoid maintaining a stack on the server side. Our representation distinguishes between tail calls and normal function calls to avoid excessive resource consumption on the VoIP side. Relational databases don’t do a very good job of storing recursive datastructures, like the AST of a programming language, so we used Mongo for the data store. In addition to its flexible data model, Mongo is web scale which has given us an immediate status boost at local programmer meetups.

The backend code is implemented in Scala and Lift. There are actually two interfaces to the service. One is the nice interface the users see, and the other is a REST interface that is called by the Asterisk AGI scripts that implement the VoIP functionality. The Asterisk system doesn’t handle all the functionality we represent internally, so the REST interface includes a small interpreter that executes intermediate steps till we arrive at something Asterisk deals with.