Scala/Lift/Akka comments

I like the idea behind both Scala and Lift.  I have been going through a couple books and implemented a Scala password sync tool for a particular application as a short/mid-term solution.  I see a lot of potential in Scala and some of my concerns are being mitigated with recent releases.  I would not say that Scala is the most intuitive language but if you can find enough small utilities to write it seems to get easier.

So far I have not found a good reason to implement any tools with Lift.  I am hoping that will change at some point.  I am intrigued by some research I did which indicated that JSF could be used with Lift.  I think it will take the implementation of a few practical utilities to understand the strengths/weaknesses and usefulness of the technologies.  At this point it would be foolish to implement anything major with Scala/Lift without determining it provides a major benefit.  It will have to be a big benefit to overcome the downside which is lack of knowledge in the remainder of the team.  Last thing I need is more projects that only I can work on.

Some areas which may be a great fit for Scala 2.9/2.10 are batch related.  With the recent parallel collections support (and more recent improvements as well) this has some real potential to simplify some data intensive tasks.  We tend to have some fairly powerful systems with lots of memory and even if using virtualized servers I think Scala could simplify/speed up some solutions. 

With Scala/Akka we could setup some multi-node batch type processes which are fault tolerant and reasonably fast.  Down side is that this seems to compete with various other solutions such as Condor thus making the evaluation process more time consuming.  In the end, I would like solutions which are fault tolerant, highly available, efficient and can leverage nearly all the available resources. Even with virtualization, we have many systems which have a consistently low load but still require high-availability. Time is not on our side when it comes to evaluating possible solutions.