By Michael Woloszynowicz  By Michael Woloszynowicz  Thursday,
December 8, 2011  A Month With Scala  Although I’ve played
around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely
involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last
month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project
finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical
REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic
Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*.  First off let’s talk about
why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal
of my last year entrenched in JavaScript and appreciating its
functional nature, brevity and flexibility, writing Java code
became a tremendous chore for me. At the same time, our
developers have grown accustomed to, and appreciative of the
wide array of quality frameworks and tools available for Java,
so a drastic departure was out of the question. This left us
with two viable options: Clojure, and Scala. Ultimately I
decided on Scala as it provided an easier tr