Having become quite interested in languages that support deployment on both Java and .NET, then diving into Scala to find it’s a good language, the obvious next step is to try using Scala on .NET. I found a little time over the weekend to try that out with good success. Notably, I haven’t tried this in a real project yet so there may yet be some significant catches, but so far it looks really quite promising.

When I was in Australia visiting Ephox’s awesome engineering team recently, it was suggested that we should be seriously looking at using Scala for some or all of the server side development we have coming up. The key benefit that was described to me was based on productivity – I certainly think that has merit but I’m somewhat more interested in it being a potential solution to the new cross platform problem1{#footlink1:1255615173985.footnote}. Options like JRuby and Jython are also a possibility in this space, but Scala fits more nicely into a Java programmers mind-set and is designed with the JVM in mind, so while it pushes a lot of boundaries, ultimately it fits with the JVM and Java very nicely2{#footlink2:1255615348893.footnote}.