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 6.0 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.
If you are looking for an inexpensive, set-and-forget digital signage solution and your content isn't customized often, Chome Sign Builder is a win. It is easy to set up, includes multiple identity providers, and its Kiosk mode makes displaying the content a breeze on many different supported devices. It also doesn't require much maintenance, so if your team is small, it's a perfect fit.
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.
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.
Chrome Sign Builder is pretty much a learn on your own and support yourself option. There is precious little by way of assistance offered by Google for the product, and responses to reports of bugs and even updates are painfully slow in coming if they come at all. If you are an IT guru, this may be ok. If you are not prepared to fend for yourself, then keep looking.
The Scala community is still pretty active and friendly. Martin Odersky, the creator Scala, and his team are sill quite passionate and gone above-and-beyond to fix bugs and address the need for more features. They also have a company called Lightbend that will help you integrate Scala into your engineering stack. I have heard mixed things about them but never worked with them myself so take what I say with a grain of salt.
We selected sign builder because of its ability to work across platforms and the promise of dynamic updates so that members and guests would have access to up-to-date information. Unfortunately, Chrome Sign Builder is a low priority at Google, suffers from reliability issues, requires significant user investment in learning the system, and failed to meet our needs. We have gone back to paper calendars and synching issues while we evaluate other products. A bit of time spent on research on the front end would have saved us considerable effort and time. In a volunteer organization, our only cost was goodwill among members while we tried the system.
