Scala vs. ScreenCloud Signage

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Scala
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
ScreenCloud Signage
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
UK company ScreenCloud offers their digital signage platform to provide marketers a content distribution platform compatible with a wide range of screens and live displays, supporting distribution of content with automated playlists and schedules.N/A
Pricing
ScalaScreenCloud Signage
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ScalaScreenCloud Signage
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ScalaScreenCloud Signage
Top Pros
Top Cons

No answers on this topic

User Ratings
ScalaScreenCloud Signage
Likelihood to Recommend
6.4
(2 ratings)
8.9
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
ScalaScreenCloud Signage
Likelihood to Recommend
Scala
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.
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ScreenCloud
Very good option to get up and running quickly without needing to invest a lot in training time for users. Less appropriate if you need to adjust your playlist content frequently throughout a day or week
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Pros
Scala
  • Organizing different playlists.
  • Coordinating content schedule and running time.
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ScreenCloud
  • Solid and flexible solution for networking a lot of screens in a couple of clicks.
  • Integrated with bunch of tools and apps.
  • Controlling media.
  • Scheduling content.
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Cons
Scala
  • 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.
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ScreenCloud
  • Scheduling dates content should be active- must manually add and remove from playlists
  • More apps ! Like a new hire welcome that automatically reads a CVS file.
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Support Rating
Scala
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.
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ScreenCloud
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Return on Investment
Scala
  • 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!
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ScreenCloud
  • increasing productivity
  • pushing infomation and news to employees easly without inturpting their progress
  • of course it's an additional cost to the company however we had to make the purchase because its a win win deal as the return deserves the cost
  • maybe it reduced our face to face meetings a little bit and that was improtant but we managed to compensate that by arranging meetings to interact with each other when its available
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