ScalaColliderZ

ScalaColliderZ is a library that provides some added features for ScalaCollider based on the scalaz library. Scalaz is a library for pure functional programming in Scala, which takes a lot of inspiration from Haskell. It has several type classes such as Monad, Monoid, Functor, etc.

ScalaColliderZ provides some methods (many more could be implemented) to deal with asynchronous tasks. Things such as sending synthdefs to the server or loading buffers are done in ScalaCollider using responder functions: we pass a function to the method that gets executed whenever the task has completed. The problem with this is that it’s not easy to sequence several tasks. For example it’s convenient to be able to load a buffer and send a synthdef and then play a synth when both tasks have completed. Promises are perfect for this. A promise is a kind of container that will have a value of certain type at some moment in the future. This is similar to Lists that are containers that can have multiple items of the same type or Option which is a container that might or might not have an item. It’s therefore also possible to use map and flatMap to get a new Promise from an existing one and foreach to execute an action when a promise get it’s value. Example:

promise{ /* do something that takes some time*/; 4 }.map(_+1).foreach(println)

Currently there are methods to load Buffers (BufferPromise.load) and to send synthDefs (mySynthDef.loadP) that return a a promise:

And an example of sequencing:

ScalaColliderZ also adds type classes instances for GE for Monoid:

I hope to add more stuff in the future.