lift
Scala, Lift, and the Future
I've been spending a decent amount of my after-hours time investigating a combination that I think will be part of the future of web programming: the Scala programming language, and the Lift web framework on top of it.
A number of high-scale, distributed systems have recently adopted Scala. Twitter's messaging queues are now handled by Scala and its Actors library. Another high-scale social game, Foursquare, uses Scala for its backend, and Lift for its web tier. (I'm excited to see a presentation about Foursquare's use of Lift at the New York Scala Enthusiasts meetup this weekend.
Rasmus Lerdorf is the inventor of PHP and author of a famous presentation at OSCMS 2007 that exposed flaws in PHP CMSs (although it showed Drupal to be light-years ahead of its open-source brethren in terms of security.) He recently cast a critical eye on Foursquare:
There are many articles about Scala on the internet, but read on to see why I'm excited.