MongoDb

MongoDb is an open-source document database, and one of the most widely deployed NoSQL databases. It is extremely easy to use with Scalatra.

There are multiple Scala clients for MongoDb, and they come with varying levels of complexity. Here are some of them, as listed in MongoDb’s Scala Language Center.

• Casbah
• Lift-mongodb
• Rogue
• Salat

Getting going with Casbah

MongoDb requires very little setup. Assuming you’ve got Mongo installed already, getting it working with Scalatra is as follows.

We’ll use the officially-supported Casbah library, but any of the others should work in basically the same way.

Dependencies

To make the following example codes work, add the following dependencies to your build.sbt:

"org.mongodb" %% "casbah" % "3.1.1",
"org.json4s" %% "json4s-jackson" % "3.5.2",
"org.json4s" %% "json4s-mongo" % "3.5.2",

Setup in ScalatraBootstrap

First, make sure you start a connection to MongoDb when your application initializes. You do this by putting a bit of code in your init method in src/main/scala/ScalatraBootstrap:

import com.mongodb.casbah.Imports._
import org.scalatra.example._
import org.scalatra._
import javax.servlet.ServletContext

class ScalatraBootstrap extends LifeCycle {
  override def init(context: ServletContext) {

     // As you can see, there's not much to do in order to get MongoDb working with Scalatra.
     // We're connecting with default settings - localhost on port 27017 -
     // by calling MongoClient() with no arguments.
    val mongoClient =  MongoClient()
    val mongoColl = mongoClient("casbah_test")("test_data")

    // pass a reference to the Mongo collection into your servlet when you mount it at application start:
    context.mount(new MongoController(mongoColl), "/*")

  }
}

The mongoColl parameter in context.mount(new MongoController(mongoColl), "/*") passes a reference to the MongoDb collection to your controller. At that point, you’re more or less ready to start working with MongoDb in your application. A controller which does some very simple MongoDb operations might look like this:

package org.scalatra.example

import org.scalatra._

// MongoDb-specific imports
import com.mongodb.casbah.Imports._

class MongoController(mongoColl: MongoCollection) extends ScalatraCasbahExampleStack {

  /**
   * Insert a new object into the database. You can use the following from your console to try it out:
   * curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" -X POST -d "key=super&value=duper" http://localhost:8080/insert
   */
  post("/insert") {
    val key = params("key")
    val value = params("value")
    val newObj = MongoDBObject(key -> value)
    mongoColl += newObj
  }

  /**
   * Retrieve everything in the MongoDb collection we're currently using.
   */
  get("/") {
    mongoColl.find()
    for { x <- mongoColl} yield x
  }

  /**
   * Query for the first object which matches the values given. If you copy/pasted the insert example above,
   * try http://localhost:8080/query/super/duper in your browser.
   */
  get("/query/:key/:value") {
    val q = MongoDBObject(params("key") -> params("value"))
    for ( x <- mongoColl.findOne(q) ) yield x
  }

}

Once you’ve got the MongoCollection available inside your controller, you can use Mongo and Scalatra together seamlessly. If you would like to learn more about Casbah, proceed to the Casbah Tutorial.

Alternately, you can apply the same basic techniques in order to get started with any of the Scala MongoDb libraries. Each library has its strengths and weaknesses, and the choice of which one to use will come down largely to your programming style.