I’ve played around with Scala off and on for over a year now, and also looked at Lift once or twice during that time. After going to David Pollak’s session at JavaOne about Lift, I decided to buckle down and actually create something with Scala and Lift, as I usually learn new things best by trying to create something useful. Looking around, I noticed there weren’t any Scala-specific job sites and thought it might be nice to create one.

The site is here: ScalaCareers.com, and you can follow on Twitter for announcements of new jobs posted and other things @scalacareers

In my opinion, jobs for a new language are extremely important in helping it get to the next level of adoption. Scala is already pretty popular and Lift is gaining in popularity, so I hope we start to see a lot more jobs that involve Scala and Lift.

I’m going to be posting some short tutorials and other things related to my experience in the coming weeks, but I thought I would share a few quick, high-level thoughts.

1) Lift is a solid, production-ready framework. I was able to learn enough of it to build a functional, albeit small, web application over the 4th of July weekend. Despite using a snapshot of the 1.1 release, I didn’t run into any bugs or severely out-of-date documentation. I mention this because it has been a slight problem when I’ve been an early adopter of frameworks in the past.

2) The Lift community is incredibly friendly and helpful. Going back through several months of activity on the Google Group, they are generally accepting of criticism, quick to offer help, and even commit changes to the trunk quickly to help folks out. A good community is very important to newcomers to a new language or framework.

3) Using Lift requires a good knowledge of Scala to really be effective. Don’t get me wrong - learning Scala is well worth the effort - but it was a bit of a change for me, coming from Grails where I was able to sort of ease into it.

4) IDE support for Scala is still a little disappointing. Even though I love Groovy, I generally prefer static typed languages to dynamic typed ones, which is why I was interested in Scala in the first place. One of the big benefits of static typed languages is that you can theoretically get better IDE support. I shelled out a few hundred bucks for IntelliJ for this purpose, and while it was marginally better than the others, I still found lots of cases where auto-complete simply didn’t work and plenty more cases where it didn’t catch compile errors. It probably cost me a few hours on the project. A good IDE doesn’t make you a better developer, but it does make you faster :)

Overall, I think Scala and Lift have bright futures and are worth checking out.