Many Java teams want a more modern language that preserves their investment in Java technology. This talk looks at Scala, a new JVM language that fixes many of the limitations of Java. I’ll show why Scala is an ideal “upgrade” language for most Java teams.

Using examples, we’ll see that Scala is statically-typed, yet it has a succinct and flexible syntax. Scala traits add mixin composition to Java’s object model. Scala fully supports functional programming, which is the best approach for robust concurrent applications. All these qualities improve our agility.