An exploration of building beautiful REST APIs in Scala with Scalatra, Swagger, and Akka. With the ease of deployment & configuration of Scalatra, it is simple to build the basic core of a good REST API. Combined with Swagger, documentation of these APIs becomes almost trivial – allowing easy collaboration with frontend developers interacting with your API. When more complex tasks are necessary – such as long running processes that shouldn't block the HTTP request, Akka can be integrated to Scalatra. We'll explore how to use this for Futures, processing Daemons and other clever tricks.