Last year during Scalar we’ve setup a couple of whiteboards for people to vote on their favorite frameworks/libraries in Scala. This year, we’ve repeated the experiment - and here are the results, thanks for voting! (Just in case, remember that these results have been gathered on a single conference using a rather unscientific and not statistically significant method).

First, let’s look at libraries to access a relational database. Here are the raw results:

And a nicer graph:

Slick is a clear winner, with over 58% of voters using it to access their relational database. However, Quill is also becoming popular, with 8 votes (9%), with Doobie and Scalikejdbc following close behind (7 votes each, 8%). Comparing with last year, were Slick was chosen by 72% of voters, we can see a much bigger diversification and a rise in popularity of alternate libraries.

What about functional programming in Scala? Here Cats is a clear winner (48%, 43 votes), followed by StdLib (30%) votes. This is a huge change comparing to last year, take a look:

It seems a lot of people are switching to Cats! Speaking of switching, how’s migration to 2.12 going? A majority (51%) is on 2.11, but 34% have already updated:

Now, everyone’s favorite subject: json libraries! There’s a myriad of options - which one to choose? spray-json leads (31 votes, 27%), but is closely followed by circe (20%), json4s (18%) and play-json (18%):

As for web libraries, there are two main contenders: akka-http with nearly 50% (51 votes) and Play with 28% (30 votes). Last year, these two were also the most popular choices, however Play used to be on top (41%), with akka-http/spray behind (38%):

IDE usage is almost the same as a year ago. IntelliJ is a clear favorite with 56% votes, with various flavors of Ensime following suit (20%). Eclipse is far behind the pack, with only 3% of votes:

Dependency Injection in Scala is often a topic of hot debate - so how does DI framework usage look in practice? Almost half of the time, the answer is “no DI” - the options “None” and “Parameters” have gathered 40% (41 votes). This is followed by Guice and MacWire, where each got 16%:

Finally, as everybody’s going reactive, which reactive streaming library is the most popular among Scalar attendees? Probably not surprisingly, it’s akka-streams with 65% of votes (46 attendees). However, we can see some competitors: Monix with 11% and scalaz-stream/fs2 and RxScala with 5%:

How will the results look next year? Well, best way to find out (and influence the results :) ) is to come to Scalar! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook or subscribe to the mailing list to be notified when details of Scalar 2018 emerge.