Name: Scala
Rating: 6 (7 reviews)
Author: Scala

Help Desk

Web and Video Conferencing

Customer Support

Innovation Management

PHP Frameworks

Development

Business Intelligence (BI)

Collaboration

Manufacturing Execution

Payment Facilitation

Quality Management

Enterprise

Accounting

Blockchain Payments

Merger and Acquisition

Payment Hubs

Finance and Accounting

Applicant Tracking

Corporate Learning Management

Employer of Record (EOR)

HR Management

Payroll

Talent Intelligence

Talent Management

Workforce Analytics

Workforce Management

Human Resources

AIOps

Bot Mitigation

Cloud Storage

Container Security

Data Center Outsourcing (Canada)

Data Center Power

Data Replication

Endpoint Security

Firewall

Fraud Detection

Graph Database

Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

LAN Switches

Mobile Data Security

Network Performance Monitoring

Network Troubleshooting

SQL Server Performance Monitoring

Scale-Out Storage

Secure Access Control

Smart Contracts

Testing Services

Information Technology

A/B Testing

Ad Serving & Retargeting

All-in-One Marketing

Content Management

Email Marketing

Grant Management Software

IP Geolocation

Marketing Attribution

Marketing Automation

Social Media Management

Survey & Forms Building

Translation

Web Analytics

Marketing

Project Management

Task Management

Professional Services

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Intelligent Virtual Assistant

Sales Dialer

Sales Training

Sales

Data-Centric Audit Protection (DCAP)

Security

Aviation

Emergency Notification

Fleet Maintenance

Hospital Management

Hotel Management

Retail Analytics

Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)

Shipping

Veterinary

Warranty Management

Vertical-Specific

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Users commonly recommend Scala as a digital signage platform that provides a comprehensive package without the need for additional hardware and software providers. They suggest undergoing training on Scala after starting to use it to enhance understanding and utilization. Moreover, users have found Scala's support to be helpful. However, it is advised by some users to consider alternative products unless there is a specific feature that Scala offers exclusively, as technical support may have limitations.

Poor Support Services: Some users have expressed their dissatisfaction with the support services provided by Scala, mentioning that it has been slow and lacking in quality. They have mentioned that it took a long time to get help on Discord, leading to frustration and delays in resolving issues.
Difficult Learning Curve: Several users have found Scala to be challenging to learn, stating that it requires experts to assist with complex tasks. They have mentioned that the learning curve for Scala can be frustrating, especially when it comes to setting up features such as the wayfinding feature. This may pose a barrier for new users or those without prior programming experience.
Limited User Interface: Users have pointed out limitations in the user interface of Scala, suggesting that further improvements could be made. Some users wished for more flexibility in curating content and displaying multiple images or video files simultaneously in a multi-window configuration. The current interface was deemed outdated by some users, who desired a more modern design.

Intuitive and Easy-to-Navigate User Interface: Users have praised Scala's user interface, stating that it is intuitive and easy to navigate. Many reviewers have found the labeling of fields to be logical, which enhances their overall experience with the platform.

Stability and Perfect Playback: Scala is highly regarded for its stability and perfect playback of content. Numerous users have expressed satisfaction with the seamless performance of Scala, ensuring a smooth viewing experience for their audience.

Great Content Management System with Advanced Features: Reviewers appreciate the advanced features provided by Scala, making it a great content management system. The platform offers tiered permission levels, enabling users to efficiently manage and control their content.

Scala has garnered a reputation for being a versatile programming language that offers optimum facilities for static programmers. Its comprehensive solution for digital signage has enabled businesses to streamline their operations by eliminating the need for multiple hardware and software providers. Users have found Scala's wayfinding feature particularly beneficial, as it helps with navigating meeting rooms, events, and conferences held at hotels. Additionally, the point of sale functionality of Scala has allowed businesses to create bounce-back offers for customers, enhancing customer engagement. 

The intuitive interface of Scala has made it accessible even to new employees with limited tech skills, empowering them to administer and control the digital signage software effectively. The software has also showcased its capabilities in managing diverse digital sign networks and catering to the needs of SMB-to-enterprise customers. This includes offering corporate messaging, analytics reporting, and public safety features. Scala's effectiveness is not limited to a specific industry; retail advertising companies have successfully used it to provide flyers and information in malls across the US. 

As a replacement for old and clunky systems, Scala has demonstrated its ability to handle complex scheduling requests in advertising while providing a lower-maintenance, professional, and flexible signage platform for businesses. Users have praised Scala's robustness and flexibility, making it their preferred choice for managing customer-facing TV content in banks' branches. In healthcare settings, Scala serves as an informative and entertaining tool to keep patients engaged. Overall, Scala stands out as a reliable solution that offers great support, stability, scalability, and efficient data management to meet diverse needs across industries ranging from retail to finance to healthcare.

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.

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Core

Entry

Elite

Network

Scala

Digital Signage software supports the transmission of text, video messaging and brand imagery from a control interface to signs outside or throughout a business, or for staging an event. The software serves a marketing purpose and should make it easier to identify a space as belonging to a business, building brand awareness and drawing positive attention and engagement with the brand its portrays.

Digital Signage

Likelihood to Recommend

Support Rating

Scala 2019-11-06 13:17:20

Scala 2020-01-17 11:10:18

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TrustRadius

Social media

Learning curve

Current company

Quite expensive

Finance department

Not editable

Web app

3rd party

Party libraries

First class

Almost never

New language

Vice versa

Built in features

Easy to learn

Home

Digital Signage Software

We use Scala as the main backend language. So this includes everything from the API, to the web app, to the deeper backend services such as for scheduling tasks, running data-workflows, and storing and saving data from our datastores. Our data science team also uses Scala with our Spark architecture. The idea, when the original engineers picked Scala, was that it would be a better version of Java and make our Engineering teams more productive.

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.

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.

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!

Scala is used by the Marketing Department to manage the customer-facing TV content at all of the bank's branches. Photo and video content is added to each playlist regularly and scheduled out to run for as long as needed. We mostly utilize it to promote local events and help illuminate certain products or services that customers may be interested in.

Organizing different playlists.
Coordinating content schedule and running time.

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.

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.

Scala

Overview

What is Scala?