As we now reach the end of this book, we would like to emphasize some key aspects on the numerous topics and concepts we have approached during this journey with Scala.

The concise and expressive syntax of the Scala language should make your code not only more readable but also more maintainable for yourself and other developers. You don't have to give up any of the libraries of the very large and mature Java ecosystem as all the APIs can be reused directly within Scala. Moreover, you benefit from many additional great Scala-specific libraries. Our recommendation is to take a piece of Java code from a domain you understand well, maybe because you wrote it in the first place one or several times before. Then, try to convert it to Scala code and refactor it to get rid of the boilerplate and to make it in a more functional style.

The Play Framework is not just another web framework; it breaks the conventional approach of long-cycle development following servlet and EJB containers where each redeploy can take a significant time. Moreover, it is built on top of rock solid and scalable technologies such as Akka, which should make you feel confident for future heavy loads and constraining availability requirements. Finally, our personal experience with it has been very enjoyable as the Scala compiler behind it has, most of the time, given very clear feedback on what the problems are when mistakes are made, all the way to the templates and routes specifications. As both Play and Akka are exposing Java APIs as well, they can make your transition easier.

We believe the future of web development is reactive, dealing with large streams of data, as it is already happening in many areas such as social media sites involving content distribution and real-time financial/analytics services.

We have only scratched the surface of what is possible to do with Scala. As you go along and dive more deeply into individual technologies, you will discover new features and endless possibilities. Our recommendation is to take one step at a time looking for achievable goals. For instance, first get used to the Scala collections, especially as they can help you to better master Java lambdas and functional programming, then write code with pattern matching, traits, for comprehensions, then move to more advanced topics such as implicits, generics and so on.

Finally, as inspiration, there is already a tremendous number of open source projects done with Scala, many books on the individual subjects we have covered, many forums contributed by a very active Scala community, as well as several years of extremely useful online videos coming from user groups and international conferences such as Scaladays (www.scaladays.org), Scala eXchange (www.skillsmatter.com/conferences/1948-scala-exchange-2014), NEScala (www.nescala.org), Jfokus (www.jfokus.se), Scala.io (www.scala.io), flatMap (www.flatmap.no), Ping (www.ping-conf.com), and Scalapeño (www.scalapeno.underscore.co.il), to only name a few. A whole calendar site of Scala events is available at http://www.scala2014.org.

With that in mind, I hope you enjoyed the book enough to continue exploring Scala, writing awesome code, and having fun as much as we did!