Goes both ways. In PHP you can take an arbitrarily complex object graph and marshall it to JSON with a few keystrokes; in Scala, unless you're working with MongoDB or other native JSON speaking backeend, you've got to go through a laborious manual process to do the same...for each complex object.
That's partly why Dynamic came about in Scala, to deal with the case where, shit, you've already got a type safe represention of an object in Scala, and now you have to create a type safe JSON version of the same -- pointless double duty...PHP, Python, Groovy, Ruby, etc. win this particular battle.
I am, BTW, completely playing devil's advocate here ;-), Scala's my daily bread; PHP, wow, I did some horrible things [shudder]
That's true about JSON - it can be quite tedious if you have to write JSON reads and writes for things like JSON validation. But Play can autogenerate the reads/writes combinators for cases where validation isn't needed, so it ends up being as simple as putting a JsonFormatter in your companion object for a case class - 1 line. Play (and Jerkson) usually knows what to do with it, assuming all nested classes have json formatters in their companion objects, too.
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Goes both ways. In PHP you can take an arbitrarily complex object graph and marshall it to JSON with a few keystrokes; in Scala, unless you're working with MongoDB or other native JSON speaking backeend, you've got to go through a laborious manual process to do the same...for each complex object.
That's partly why Dynamic came about in Scala, to deal with the case where, shit, you've already got a type safe represention of an object in Scala, and now you have to create a type safe JSON version of the same -- pointless double duty...PHP, Python, Groovy, Ruby, etc. win this particular battle.
I am, BTW, completely playing devil's advocate here ;-), Scala's my daily bread; PHP, wow, I did some horrible things [shudder]
That's true about JSON - it can be quite tedious if you have to write JSON reads and writes for things like JSON validation. But Play can autogenerate the reads/writes combinators for cases where validation isn't needed, so it ends up being as simple as putting a JsonFormatter in your companion object for a case class - 1 line. Play (and Jerkson) usually knows what to do with it, assuming all nested classes have json formatters in their companion objects, too.
I am just glad to be done with PHP.
Agreed, Scala JSON libs are taking the a lot of the boilerplate pain away, but still not quite at the foo.toJson stage.
shhhh, this is, you know, a PHP thread ;-)