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I am designing an API where one of the methods needs to provide a way to get file content.

I do not want the method to return a file location as potentially files will be stored in the database. I also do not want to return file content as Array[Byte] as the files can be quite big.

In Java I would create a method that returns an InputStream.

What is the recommended way of doing it in Scala?

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  • And why wouldn't a plain ole InputStream fit the bill? It's a pretty reasonable abstraction Commented May 25, 2015 at 8:54
  • InputStream would fit the bill. I am still learning Scala and very often find that there are many ways to achieve the same thing. For example akka-http doesn't use InputStreams. So I asked this question to find out what is the most Scala-way to do what I want without sacrificing performance. Commented May 25, 2015 at 9:05

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Scala doesn't really have much in the way of I/O. You could return a Scala.io.Source, which is really a wrapper around InputStream (as pretty much anything will have to be, since that's all any JVM program has access to).

There's an interesting Scala I/O library, not a standard library, based on Java 7 stuff, iirc. And there's Scalaz Stream, which is the best thing out there, though it still uses an InputStream under the covers if you are handling files.

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io.Source looks more like java.io.Reader and works with character streams. I guess I will just use InputStream then. Thank you.
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The recommended way of doing it in Scala is by using InputStream instead of reinventing the wheel.

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