Most programming enthusiasts can't have missed that Scala has lately been getting alot of positive and exciting buzz! Most notably Twitter rewrote important parts of their core service in Scala, with great success and the infamous fail-whale is slowly becoming a funny, distant, memory. The twitter-guys have since been invited to a lot of conferences to tell their story. It seems Scala is quickly becoming the language of choice for people who need more then languages such as Ruby can provide.
Scala is an interesting language that lets you write elegant and concise code that is type-safe and integrates both functional and object-oriented programming models while still using, and supporting, the Java Virtual Machine. This way all improvements in Java and JVM trickles down to Scala aswell.
What's interesting but sometimes hard to grasp is how these languages that use a common VM (for instance Java, Scala, Groovy and JPython or C#, VB.Net and IronPython) can support and work together, using libraries and frameworks from one and another. To clear this up and show how cool Scala can be, Rob Lally has created an excellent series where he rewrites examples from our Vaadin-book into Scala, you can find the first post here and all his Vaadin-posts here, there are 6 now but it seems to be continuing and at each more advanced example Scala's non-verbosity starts to shine more, as Joonas said: "Scala is just really expressive. If we just have had this expressiveness when designing the Vaadin core API:s in 2002…"
Obviously we like the fact that Rob used Vaadin but its a great blog-series about Scala as well and like our Services Manager, Henri Muurimaa, said: "This really makes me want to take a better look at Scala, amazing stuff".
Thank you Rob for your awesome posts!