I was writing functionality to merge download chunks yesterday. This functionality takes a file that is downloaded in chunks and mergers these chunks back into a single file. Writing the test class I did not want my test to depend on downloading a file in chunks, so I needed a way to quickly generate a number of chunks that could be merged. Under Linux the dd command is available that generates a file of a given size that contains random contents. I wrote a small helper class that does exactly this, with the extra twist that it splits the file into a number of chunks. Continue reading →

I continue to be amazed by what can be done with Scala. Once you start to understand the simplicity and beauty of coding in Scala it is really easy and fun. As part of my learning exercise I am implementing a multi threaded downloader. One part of the solution is a splitter. It takes a file size and splits it up into a number of chunks that can be downloaded in parallel. I have implemented a Chunk, that holds information about a chunk, as a case class and created a trait ChunkDownload that can be bolted on to this case class at runtime. This is so called composable behavior which adds functionality to the case class. Continue reading →