Rise Vision vs. Scala

It is a useful program to use around a school or large business to display digital signs. It might be tacky for very professional businesses though.

Incentivized

If you are in the data science world, Scala is the best language to work with Spark, the defacto data science data store. I think that is really the main likely reason I would ever recommend Scala. Another reason is if you already have a team of programmers familiar with functional programming, e.g. they all have years of Haskell experience. In that case, I definitely think Scala is a superior and faster-growing language than Haskell and that picking up Scala after Haskell should be quick.

Incentivized

• It was easy to upload & remove digital signs to rise vision in order to post them to screens around the school.
• It was easy to organize into folders & rearrange the order of the digital signs in each folder.

Incentivized

• Compatibility with Java: if you are switching off of Java onto a new language, one reason to pick Scala is that it is about 99% compatible with Java, so any Java libraries or code you were using before can be called from Scala (not vice-versa though).
• Great built-in features for managing concurrency (e.g. Futures, Actors, and Akka). Making the most of every single thread on the machines your Scala code is running on is much easier and safer than doing it with Java. Scala abstracts away thread pools and threads quite well with Futures. I wouldn't say Futures are easy to learn though....but they are definitely safer to use than pure threads.
• Null-pointer safety: In Scala, null pointers are rare because most libraries pass around a class called Option when whatever you are referencing could possibly be null. Options are first-class and the functional nature of Scala combined with Options means you can almost always avoid referencing a null directly using Option.map or Option.flatMap (see here for what they do https://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/scala/Option.html). That means you'll almost never encounter another null-pointer exception unless you do something quite stupid and avoidable. Java has Options for helping with this now, but it's not widely used and not nearly as powerful.

Incentivized

• None so far

Incentivized

• The social media feed is not editable.
• The social media feed cuts off link previews in posts, which can hurt posts that rely on visual context.

Incentivized

The Scala community is still pretty active and friendly. Martin Odersky, the creator Scala, and his team are sill quite passionate and gone above-and-beyond to fix bugs and address the need for more features. They also have a company called Lightbend that will help you integrate Scala into your engineering stack. I have heard mixed things about them but never worked with them myself so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Incentivized

We used Hypersign for three years, which was packaged with our mass notification install (displays, alert system, SMS, sirens, etc). While Hypersign "got the job done" - it was very limited. The interface was not very user friendly, it seemed dated and was slow. We were limited to a handful of templates that were not customizable. We were shocked at the price when we got our first license renewal.

Incentivized

• We saved about 70% in licensing costs by switching to Rise Vision from another provider.
• Compatible hardware is low cost.
• IT involvement is minimal.

Incentivized

• Scala has helped market accounts in-branch in a more visually engaging way than your garden-variety collateral.
• Scala players have shut down on more than one occasion, and it can take time to order and receive a replacement.

Incentivized