So I went to the last half of Scala Lift Off on Saturday (only half, because the first half was taken up by my final MBA class. Ever.). I went primarily out of curiosity, not knowing much about Scala or Lift. The main draw was the built in comet support for Lift, which seems to not be a focus in other frameworks... at least not for Rails. We currently use Juggernaut for comet support, but depending on flash is something of a liability (see: iPhone), and Juggernaut itself isn't as smoothly integrated with Rails as i'd like.
I came away extremely impressed. Scala is relatively unheralded in the world of alternative JVM languages (see Groovy, Jython and JRuby publicity), but shows a lot of promise. It's a functional language with an expressive syntax that allows you to easily create code that looks DSL-ish. These are the primary features that drew me to Ruby (ok, Ruby isn't a functional language, but you can sorta fake it). But Scala has a better integration story with existing Java libraries, is strongly typed, and has a stronger functional bent.
I'm a big believer in the right tool for the job, and as such don't fall into a pure-dynamic or pure-static language camp. I also don't fall into a single language camp. I really enjoy Ruby for quick prototyping, and love Rails for quick prototyping of webapps, and maintaining a nimble production face on web applications. But Rails falls down when I need to run background processing. The times I think hardest about moving back to a Java webapp environment are when I need to go write something that doesn't just receive a web request and terminate. This is where concurrency issues get painful to deal with, Ruby daemons/DRb are painful, and starting up a whole Rails env for simple processing is rough.
So I'm hoping Scala/Lift fills that void. I'm mentally sketching out a replacement of our background processing jobs (Twitter integration, email processing, etc.) with Scala, and in particular the Actors library. These are relatively simple processing tasks, and should give me a decent feel for the language. It should also improve the stability and scalability of our background processing. It may also yield some reasonable libraries to contribute back (Scala Twitter library, Scala ActiveRecord bridge).
Once I have that nailed down, an evaluation of how Lift can/should fit into the framework is in order... or maybe I'll have to start my Rettiwt side project based on Lift.
I came away extremely impressed. Scala is relatively unheralded in the world of alternative JVM languages (see Groovy, Jython and JRuby publicity), but shows a lot of promise. It's a functional language with an expressive syntax that allows you to easily create code that looks DSL-ish. These are the primary features that drew me to Ruby (ok, Ruby isn't a functional language, but you can sorta fake it). But Scala has a better integration story with existing Java libraries, is strongly typed, and has a stronger functional bent.
I'm a big believer in the right tool for the job, and as such don't fall into a pure-dynamic or pure-static language camp. I also don't fall into a single language camp. I really enjoy Ruby for quick prototyping, and love Rails for quick prototyping of webapps, and maintaining a nimble production face on web applications. But Rails falls down when I need to run background processing. The times I think hardest about moving back to a Java webapp environment are when I need to go write something that doesn't just receive a web request and terminate. This is where concurrency issues get painful to deal with, Ruby daemons/DRb are painful, and starting up a whole Rails env for simple processing is rough.
So I'm hoping Scala/Lift fills that void. I'm mentally sketching out a replacement of our background processing jobs (Twitter integration, email processing, etc.) with Scala, and in particular the Actors library. These are relatively simple processing tasks, and should give me a decent feel for the language. It should also improve the stability and scalability of our background processing. It may also yield some reasonable libraries to contribute back (Scala Twitter library, Scala ActiveRecord bridge).
Once I have that nailed down, an evaluation of how Lift can/should fit into the framework is in order... or maybe I'll have to start my Rettiwt side project based on Lift.
