Practical Scala DSLs

 Hello, and welcome to Practical Scala DSLs. Scala has become very popular, and with more companies adopting the language every day, its popularity and growth have swelled.

 DSLs, a way for designing software using its inherent techniques, is essentially a set of patterns that can describe software in “plain English.” This book does not attempt to cover all the theory behind DSLs. A fantastic book, Domain-Specific Languages, by Martin Fowler (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2010) provides a basic understanding of this.

 With this book, I wish to describe how to use DSLs in everyday projects. The scope of the book is to give the reader an idea of how to use a DSL on the job and, by the end of the book, see how DSLs can be used in different projects. What I intend to show is how to approach DSLs from a practical standpoint and teach the reader how to think about integrating DSLs in their daily work life.

 To better understand the book, the reader must be familiar with Scala, able to write a simple program in Scala, and have an idea about its architecture. Ideally, the reader will have in addition some familiarity with Java programming. This is because both Scala and Java use the Java virtual machine (JVM), and some examples discussed in the text highlight the differences between Scala and Java. Last, the reader should have an affinity for an editor. I use IntelliJ, but any editor would be fine.