Ten months ago we posted about architectural changes to Typesafe Activator. After a few a lot of yak shaves, side projects, and detours, we have Activator 1.3.0 based on sbt server, a new setup where multiple clients can share the same instance of sbt. sbt server is also available in ABI-stable protocol-stable form for other clients (IDEs, command line, desktop status icon, whatever you can think of) to try out.

In this post, we will go over the dependency management improvements that were added to sbt 0.13.6 and 0.13.7 including:

• Performance improvements with cached resolution
• Eviction warnings
• Unresolved dependency errors

A curious thing. At training events, hackathons and any chance I get I have started asking people what they think of Activator. There are a range of different answers, usually followed by questions once the subject has been broached.

The questions are varied, but over a large enough sample size, surprisingly consistent. It seems that Activator is a fairly misunderstood tool, and it’s not just me who noticed. This blog post will attempt to address those frequently asked questions and even if it doesn’t convince you that Activator is your new best friend, at least you might consider keeping it in your toolbox.

As readers of the Typesafe newsletter may know, every month we promote an Activator template that embodies qualities we look for in tutorials and topics. This month’s activator template is a return to first principles of Activator as an experimentation and discovery tool. While the selection may be below your level, gentle reader, I will bet as an existing Scala developer, at least someone has asked you at some point how to go about learning Scala from the ground up, or even better, how to go about learning to program.

Today we’re excited to announce an Activator partner integration release that makes it easy to add production monitoring of Reactive apps with AppDynamics and New Relic.

Recently we hosted a Hackathon at Immobilienscout in Berlin to get everyone excited for Scala Days! We’re happy to say it was a huge success! Markus and Lutz teamed up with Berlin's thriving Scala community, encouraging participants to create something special in a short time. 

We've recently had some questions about Typesafe Activator and how it relates to other projects on the Typesafe Platform, such as Scala, Akka, Play Framework, and sbt. The tool has evolved a lot since we launched it over a year ago, both in use cases and features, and we're continually working on improvements to make it the best way to get started with our technology.

Show off your skills and help fellow devs get started building Reactive apps by participating in the Go Reactive Activator Competition! This competition will focus on Activator templates that highlight Scala, and winners will be announced at the 5th annual Scala Days conference in Berlin.

A big thanks to all who attended our most recent webinar with James Ward, A Java Developer’s Primer to the Typesafe Platform. We've been blown away by how well received this series has been, so thank you for participating and we hope you continue to find it valuable! For those of you who missed out, or want to rewatch and share the session with colleagues, we recorded the presentation for your convenience.

Software is going Reactive! Event-Driven, Scalable, Resilient, and Responsive are the new requirements weaving their way through HTML5, Mobile, NoSQL, and Big Data applications.  With so much changing in how developers build software, developers need to get up to speed quickly and easily.  This is why we created Typesafe Activator, and today we’re excited to release version 1.0!

Just over three months ago we released the first developer preview of Typesafe Activator.  Since then developers have been raving about how easy it is to start building applications on the Typesafe Platform using Activator.  Today we are excited to announce that Activator is open source!

Yesterday, James Ward, developer advocate at Typesafe, presented a webinar on building Reactive Apps with the Typesafe Platform. For those of you who missed out, or simply want to rewatch and share the session with friends and colleagues, we recorded James' presentation for your viewing pleasure!

Last week the community contributed two new Typesafe Activator templates that are helping developers learn how to build modern web apps with the Typesafe Platform. Matthias Nehlsen's SSE Chat Template with AngularJS template and Jan Machacek's Akka and Spray template are fantastic additions to the growing list of Activator templates.

Today we are kicking off the fourth annual Scala Days conference in New York. The week will be jam packed with exciting presentations like Martin Odersky's keynote, Scala with Style and Jonas Boner's session on Going Reactive: Scalable, Highly Concurrent and Fault-Tolerant Systems.