Scala and the Lift web applicaton framework

I have been playing with Scala for a while - playing is the correct word to use since I am waiting to see how popular the language becomes. I think that Scala will possibly end up being 'the better Java' for the JVM, but for my business I prefer not learning and using another language that is not main stream (my almost 25 years of using Lisp professionally has sometimes been a hassle because of the unavailability of other skilled Lisp developers and a smaller ecosystem, and I don't want to devote a lot of time to mastering another language that may end up being "on the fringe").

That said, Scala is a very nice language that has two non-language things going for it: very efficient runtime performance with OK memory use and that it runs on the JVM. Scala looks to be a good language for AI development and its interactive console adds some of the advantages of interactive bottom up development - a style I like to use when working in Lisp, Ruby, or Python.

Until this morning I have only read about the Scala Lift web framework, but after reading Vivek Pandey's blog about running Lift I gave it a try this morning. The maven setup and default web application construction was all very smooth, and the generated code was interesting to read. I also like the way Scala unit tests work and the debug modes supporting both an interactive Scala console and running with an embedded jetty web server. Everything works very well together and the entire system has a polished feel to it.

Comments

  1. Zemian Deng5:43 PM

    Hello Mark,

    Check out http://code.google.com/p/sweetscala as well. It's more MVC and OO oriented approach using Scala.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant7:07 AM

    Thanks, I just took a quick look at sweetscala - looks interesting. I am still deciding whether I want to invest the time in Scala to move past the "just having fun with it" stage, and to use it for real projects. I am rally waiting for excellent IDE support before I make up my mind.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown7:54 AM

    Yeah, I am a java developer and have been spoiled by Eclipse. It was specially tough for me to decide start investing time into a Scala project where the IDE is limited. But then I am always good with my plain editor(jEdit) and I find myself not much behind as productive wise when coding Scala with it. As I add more codes and design the framework around Sweet, I have so much fun with Scala coding that it makes me little sad to put it down when working on my real job with Java. :)

    Also as part of Sweet goal is to provide a toolbox that can generate and start off things with single command line. So it's not too bad to get a new project running with just:

    $ toolbox create-project myapp
    $ cd myapp && mvn jetty:run

    I hope you will check back after a stable release and give more comments then.

    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more