Scala community growing ever faster

I'm becoming more involved with the Scala community and it looks very, very promising. The Scala Lift-Off event in London was a success, as demonstrated by richard's blog and maciek's notes on day 1  and day 2

Scala 2.8 was released in July, and already has an impressive list of bugfixes in 2.8.1. This demostrates the commitment from the community. Furthermore, Martin Odersky announced Scala Solutions, a new venture to offer commercial support and training.

The two biggest proposals of the event were Lift, which released the version 2.1 of their framework. Tim, who is writing a book on Lift made some really interesting comments. Particularly, I learnt about Squeryl, a fantastic framework to construct SQL queries in a friendly Scala DSL syntax, offering full compiler support ... and more importantly, refactoring.

Akka, the concurrency framework is close to the much awaited 1.0 release. Jonas Boner has made many presentations since then, including one at LinkedIn , which, by the way, uses Scala intensively with both Norbert and Scalatra, a Sinatra-like web framework in Scala

Graham Tackley, and ex-colleague of mine, did a nice presentation on The Guardian move to (and love of) Scala

Videos are available here

For great presentations, including some upcoming features in 2.9, have a look at the  Scala Days 2010 website. Parallel collections, scala refactorings for Eclipse, and much more.

Exciting days for the Scala community !

In the meantime, the demand for Scala in my current job is growing exponentially, so I'm currently preparing some presentations on the subject. Stay tuned!