Over time I’ve been becoming increasingly enamoured of Scala. Like many technologies that I come to love, the first two or three times I try them I come away unsatisfied. I don’t know what it is, but some technologies keep me coming back until they click. Scala’s been like that. The first time I was put off by the apparent complexity of the syntax, the second time I was put off when I was stymied by the lack of a useable reflection mechanism. This time round… I’m happy and I feel at home.
So, I’ve been looking round at web frameworks in the Scala world, and there wasn’t a lot that pleased me. I can see why some people would like Lift - if it was 1998 and we hadn’t figured out that the only thing worse than having code in your markup, is having markup in your code. Maybe this is another one of those things I’ll come back to and have a click moment on. But, for now Lift goes in the “bad idea that works only because of the brain power behind it” pile.
So I started looking round for something that lined up better with my personal sensibilities. I’ve often been attracted to Echo, and it looked like it might be what I was looking for - a component framework that would let me write only in Java - or in this case Scala. Development of Echo 2 seems to be mostly at an end and Echo 3 is closing in on a production release.
I want to develop now, the “keeping up with Jones’” part of me doesn’t want to use Echo 2 and the “oh, god, the pain” part of me doesn’t want to use a beta release of a framework in an untested configuration.
Poking around the Echo home page, I came across this post mentioning Vaadin. From a development perspective Vaadin looked very similar to Echo - application centric, everything is written in Java, component based. And they’ve just released a new version (6.0) with some outstanding documentation including the very nifty Book of Vaadin.
I’m a sucker for a well documented open source project, so I’m trying it with Scala rather than Java, and I’ll document my experiments here.
Joonas Lehtinen, who I believe has a connection to Vaadin asked me to report to the Scala or Vaadin mailing lists - once I’ve got a couple of these posts up I’ll drop a link into the Vaadin forums.
PS I’m not picking a fight with the Lift people, I respect them and I wish them every success. I’ve bought the Lift Book and David Pollack’s excellent Scala book, so I’m doing what I can to support the community. Even though I think they’re off in the weeds. Dammit, I didn’t mean to type that out loud.
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