Stax Networks

Crank your productivity with Scala and Stax April 29, 2010

Scala has always been supported on Stax cloud platform, but we’re thrilled to see a recent surge in interest from the Scala community. To help everyone get started quickly with Scala and Lift on Stax, we’ve created a new maven archetype and published some tutorials on the wiki.

The Stax team has actually been using Scala for internal feature development for a few months now and we’ve really grown to love its lightweight syntax and deep functionality.

Since the Stax cloud provides a fully-functional Java runtime, developers can leverage all of the features provided by Scala, including Actors, which provide a powerful message-based construct for handling concurrency. The Stax database service also gives apps an easy way to leverage Lift’s rich persistence model.

Here’s a quick glance at what it now takes to get a simple Scala app started and deployed…

Create a new Scala project
mvn archetype:generate \
-DarchetypeCatalog=http://mvn.stax.net/archetypes.xml

Run and test the Scala project locally
mvn stax:run

Deploy the Scala project to the Stax cloud
mvn stax:deploy

# mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://mvn.stax.net/archetypes.xml
Choose archetype:
1: http://mvn.stax.net/archetypes.xml -> stax-scala-archetype (Scala 2.8 with Stax Plugins)
Choose a number:  (1): 1
Define value for groupId: : example
Define value for artifactId: : myapp3
Define value for version:  1.0-SNAPSHOT: : 
Define value for package:  example: : 
# mvn stax:run
INFO: Starting Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-8080
# mvn stax:deploy
Deploying application spike/myapp3
........................uploaded 25%
........................uploaded 50%
........................uploaded 75%
........................upload completed
INFO: upload complete, response=<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ApplicationDeployArchiveResponse>
  <id>spike/myapp3</id>
  <url>http://myapp3.spike.staxapps.net</url>
</ApplicationDeployArchiveResponse>

I hope you’ll try out Scala and Lift on Stax to feel the productivity boost you’ll gain when combining the next generation of language, framework and deployment environments for the Java runtime. See if you don’t love the end-to-end experience as much as we do.