[zak_mc_kracken]

First of all, your attitude is off putting and condescending. You don't convince people by telling them "You guys are living in the past, look how I do things, you should do the same".

Please enough of that, especially coming from the Scala community. Let's act as professionals and judge tools on their merits instead of instigating flame wars.

Second, I'm doing both (web Java at work, web Scala on my spare time) and in my experience, there is really no clear winner. What's especially interesting is that I can find about the same number of positive things to say about the Scala tool stack (Scala/Typesafe platform/Akka/Play) as I can say negative things about each of them. Every time I'm happy about something in the Scala world, I find something I'm not happy with that counter balances it (tooling, slowness of template recompilation, unprovedness of the actor model, Play's arguable step backward in the v2 compared to v1, etc...).

Java is impossibly verbose and has a very limited type system compared to Scala but man... do I develop things quickly with it. There is close to zero friction to get from nothing to something workable, maintainable and fast. And the tooling is top notch, the environment and compilers are super stable, and Java 8 is numbing a lot of the pain I used to feel. In contrast, I feel that I'm often fighting against the Scala compiler whenever I write Scala code. It feels nice in the end to see how concise and neat the code looks compared to Java, but I'm never really convinced the pain was worth it.

So, back to your original point: I've tried (and continue to experiment with) all these "new" technologies that Scala is claiming to bring to the table, and so far, I'm unconvinced that they are a clear improvement over what we currently use in the Java world.

And given that Scala continues to be a marginal language on the JVM, I don't think I'm the only one doubting that Scala represents the future.

[mark242]

Don't take my comment as "quit living in the past". Take it as "here's how exciting the future is". I'm not telling you your startac phone is crap, I'm telling you there's this great new thing called the iPhone/Android/smartphone.

The real benefits of Play and Akka become apparent when a third-party service you send API calls to starts acting flaky. Or when your web service that you offer to clients is suddenly being hit by an iPhone game that just got purchased by a million people. Or when that nasty little bug that winds up throwing an exception from time to time rears its head all of a sudden. Play and Akka give you a resilience that is very hard to come by in the Java world.

Typesafe's home page has, in giant type, "Applications are becoming Reactive" and they are absolutely spot f'ing on. Writing blocking code, waiting on threads, assuming you're running on one JVM, these things are great and all, and very easy to do because all of those templates are built into IntelliJ and you just have to click a few buttons to get all that, but wow, the performance difference once you get into the Play world is just frighteningly good.

[jaxytee]

I don't find mark242's comment off putting or condescending at all. He's just telling is like it is.

Of course there are Java developers who can kick ass with Spring, Hibernate, Servlet containers, and war deployments, but all of these tools are huge, bloated, and starting to show their age. Modern frameworks like Play make things simpler for those of us who don't have +7 year JEE experience with Spring and Hibernate.

[cpprototypes]

The comment is off topic since the article is not about Spring or JBoss and it recommends against using Hibernate. The article is about a modern lightweight stack (JAX-RS, Jetty, Dagger, JDBI).

[jaxytee]

Not it's not, rebutting another poster who is commenting about Play (a modern java web development framework) in a article that is about modern java web development frameworks. Your comment is counter productive to this conversation, and the purpose of Hackernews in general.

[ryanobjc]

He's just telling like he thinks it is.

There, fixed that for ya.

I agree with the Java vs Scala poster. And unlike him, I have a 30,000 line scala production project under my belt. Everything he says is true, and then some. Ever split up a file into chunks because intellij can't edit it effectively?

Yeah, didn't think so. (Just telling like it is)

[saryant]

> And unlike him, I have a 30,000 line scala production project under my belt. Everything he says is true, and then some. Ever split up a file into chunks because intellij can't edit it effectively?

I have a 20k line Scala project in production and editing it has certainly never been an issue. Why does Intellij have problems with large files?

[kasey_junk]

I've written several large Scala projects and never had Intellij choke on large files.

[ryanobjc]

Incrementally compiling a 3000 line file in 2011 as you edited it.

I'm sure the Jetbrains folks have fixed that right up, but at the time, breaking it into 500 line chunks was required, due to the exponential nature of the slowdown we accomplished.

The basic reality is Scala compiles are slow. Syntax and red-line highlighting isn't cheap, and no amount of brilliant russian IDE developers can totally fix everything.

[saryant]

2011 was a long time ago.

scalac certainly isn't fast but I just clean compiled our 20k line project in 75 seconds.

I'm not claiming that's great or anything, I just don't find it to be a showstopper.

[virtualwhys]

> Incrementally compiling a 3000 line file in 2011 as you edited it

Heh, that's brilliant, read the SBT compilation guide, 1 source file per class (obviously that's not set in stone, but a good guideline to follow).

Also, SBT is boss. Enabling automatic build in one's IDE is asking for pain. Why, why is the IDE blocking when I save the file? That's why.

> The basic reality is Scala compiles are slow

For deployment sure, but not a show stopper either (20K LOC in around a minute on warm JVM).

For incremental builds Scala is not even remotely slow, particularly if you follow best practices and break your application up into modules (sub projects in sbt world).

Anyway, things have changed (a lot) since 2011, we're not in the stone ages anymore -- if you want that, go check out Haskell where you'll get no tooling, no stack traces, and eternal compile times ;-) With a superior type system, brilliant community, yada, yada if that's your thing.

[thescrewdriver]

Same here, we have multiple large Scala systems, never had issues editing files in IntelliJ.

[wtetzner]

> ... Java 8 is numbing a lot of the pain I used to feel.

Interestingly, the biggest thing I wish I had when writing Java is algebraic data types and pattern matching. A few years ago I would have said it was lambda, but having sum types would make expressing many things so much easier.