Chrome Sign Builder, from Google, is a digital signage utility that allows users to schedule and display content across managed Chrome devices and networks, built to make it easy to show web content content such as restaurant menus, images, and YouTube videos and playlists–as well as Google Presentations, which can be edited by anyone who has access to the presentation.
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Scala
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Scala in Malvern, PA offers their digital signage software which provides Designer for content design, Content Manager for content organization and control, and Player for content viewing. Notably the software supports a wide array of digital signage including touchscreen kiosks and service for direct customer engagement and interaction.
Chrome Sign Builder seems to work best when only one or two resources are displayed. Rotating through multiple screens in slideshow format without a ready ability to advance and pause causes some problems. When scheduling five outdoor ranges and a clubhouse, individuals have to stand and watch as sometimes complex calendars scroll by focusing on specific data and time. On the other hand, when limited to one or two rouses, the system works well enough.
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.
Use Chrome Sign Builder to display menus. For example, to show menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, create 3 schedules. Each schedule has its own menu URL to display the menu content.
create a presentation using Google Slides and display it using Chrome Sign Builder.
When you publish the presentation, set it to start as soon as it loads and restart again after the last slide.
The built-in compiler, scalac, is sssssssssslllllooooowwwwww. I mean like, if you thought the Java compiler was slow, try Scala! The default compiler on my 12k line codebase takes 4 minutes to compile from scratch on my i7 quad-core machine. This can be mitigated through the paid solution of Hydra which compiles your code in parallel. Unfortunately, it's quite expensive and your legal department or finance department may not approve of it. But if they do, for me, it reduced my compile time down to 80 seconds, much more manageable.
Scala is not going anywhere and support for it is slowly dying. This is the main reason I would not choose Scala for my next company or project. Important Scala libraries such as secure social (which is used for OAuth, a major requirement of every web app) are hardly maintained. Another library that suffers from lack of updates is Slick, the database mapper. There aren't enough engineers working on it to even provide support for the new features that came out in Postgres 9.0 (e.g. JSONb). There is simply not enough of a community to drive Scala forward and keep 3rd party libraries up to date as Java world does it.
As a corollary of a stagnant community, hiring Scala developers is hard as well. Of the 30 backend engineers we've hired, only 3 came in already knowing Scala. And as I will mention below, this is a BIG problem because learning Scala is really tough.
The learning curve for Scala is very, very steep. Anecdotally, I came into my current company with strong Java experience. Java is the closest language to Scala but it took me 6 months before I stopped needing to pair program on easy tickets. It doesn't help that Scala has some weird syntax like Map[A, +B] and that it forces you to do functional programming.
Support can be sparse, lengthy wait times, and sometimes not the most helpful solutions. If you really need assistance using it - contacting your VAR is a better bet than using Chrome Sign Builder support. We have also had frustrating cases where support will close tickets without a solution.
The customer service team is very responsive and usually returns calls or emails within a couple of hours of placing a request or inquiry. Just about every rep I've spoken to has been very thorough and helpful, walking me through each problem and explaining the solutions in a way that's easy to understand.
Chrome Sign Builder is very strong and flexible on manipulation and the quality of signs management is an effective and an excellent forms management system which is very easy on deployment and management of all our project documents. The easy-on reports building through Chrome Sign Builder is also another big point and the dashboard is very easy to adapt.
Negative: slow engineer onboarding. As I mentioned before, it took me 6 months to get up-to-speed on Scala and didn't need to bother more senior Scala engineers anymore for help with every ticket. That's hundreds of hours I wasted of myself and other engineer's time.
Positive: thread safety, no concurrency bug. The ROI on this one is really hard to calculate, but I do believe Scala has saved me hundreds of hours over the past few years by allowing me to never have to worry about deadlocks or race conditions. Scala is simply so safe we've never had race conditions within the JVM before.
Negative: third-party libraries aren't maintained so we have to fork and update them ourselves. As I mentioned before, we use Securesocial but it stopped receiving updates and there is simply no alternative to it. So, we forked it and put an engineer on it for a month to get it back up-to-date. What a waste of his time!
