Been there done that. 3.5 years of Play 1, but they decided to rewrite it in Scala and I left in anger.
Nearly one year now of servlet dev, trying nearly anything I can get my hands on. Most I have been satisfied with is Restlet for service development, otherwise nothing even comes close to Play 1.
Finally decided to harden up and learn Scala. I have set my prejudices aside and after a month, I can safely say I am a _write_only_ Scala developer. I still can't read much of the fancy code in the wild, but for my immediate needs, gluing java libraries together, it's a far superior language to Java.
My opinionated guide to developing modern Java is: get TypeSafe Activator and learn Scala.
I actually started learning Scala: completed Odersky's Coursera class and developed a Play 2 project in Scala. Overall I like it, but reading others' code is often frustrating, shorthand shortcuts in language are still kinda alien looking, and even figuring how to handle simple things like multi-file upload with Play's controllers, I feel I don't quite understand what the hell is going on underneath all that magical functional code that I myself wrote by assembling bits and pieces from elsewhere.
And then I watch stuff like Paul Phillips presentations [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jh94gowim0] and I just don't know whether continuing to invest my time in Scala is a wise decision long-term.
I'll probably try Clojure at some point, but for production-grade projects I will do Java for now. I feel the most frustrating thing about tech is having to place bets constantly on what to invest your time learning. It's eerily similar to investing in stocks. You never know what's going to live or die. And I'm saying this as a former Delphi developer with multi-year experience. :)
I started Scala from cold as it were without having ever done Java. I found myself having to read Scala code (source for things like Lift) 'backwards' to understand it. I read the body of functions from top to bottom but lines from right to left as maps/flatmaps make much more sense to me when picked apart that way. Maybe this is common/standard, not sure.
Nearly one year now of servlet dev, trying nearly anything I can get my hands on. Most I have been satisfied with is Restlet for service development, otherwise nothing even comes close to Play 1.
Finally decided to harden up and learn Scala. I have set my prejudices aside and after a month, I can safely say I am a _write_only_ Scala developer. I still can't read much of the fancy code in the wild, but for my immediate needs, gluing java libraries together, it's a far superior language to Java.
My opinionated guide to developing modern Java is: get TypeSafe Activator and learn Scala.