First of all I was surprised that an event specifically targeted towards Scala was happening in India and very fortunately in New Delhi itself. I attend the ScalaTraits 2013 event in New Delhi a couple of days back.
The event was put together by Knoldus, a company specializing exclusively in Scala and related technologies.
The agenda was like this:
Introductory talk
This talk was an introduction to the Scala ecosystem as a whole by Vikas Hazrati. He discussed some history, which Scala technologies are currently popular and which companies are using them.
Kick start to Scala by Sanjeev Kumar
This was a 3 hour session on some core concepts in Scala, followed by setting up Scala IDE bundle and using Scala Worksheets to try out some cool examples.
Some of the topics I remember right away are Functional Programming, Equational Reasoning, Functional Language features ( functions are fist class values, it encourages immutability ), every statement has a return value ( and a type ), compound expression has a return type as well, Type inference, Classes and Objects, Class Inheritance, Default constructor, Predef object, Case classes, Functional Objects ( those objects that do not have mutable state ), File processing etc.
Kick start to Play Neeklanth Sachdeva
This was a 3 hour session in which we learnt how Play is an MVC web framework ( quite a lot like Ruby on Rails actually ). We setup Play development environment, created a sample Play app with database connectivity, some routes, and a basic HTML view. Then we deployed it on Heroku.
All in all, it was a good learning experience with on-the-spot hands-on exercises. Other than that, the venue was very nice, with great food and pleasant team at work. Bravo!