Scala programming environment

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Which IDE for Scala 2.8?

I'm learning Scala by reading 'Programming in Scala' book by Odersky et al.

What programming environment people use for scala?

I've used TextMate and emacs, and trying to use eclipse for Java.

Answer 1

I'm using IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition and Scala plugin for IDEA

Answer 2

There are several options, with varying degrees of maturity:

• Emacs has good bindings;
• Eclipse has a plugin;
• Intellij IDEA has a Scala plugin and a community edition;
• NetBeans has it's plugin for scala (I believe a lot of people on the Lift side us it).

Other tools that are not IDEs but will help have on your routine (specially if you are not addicted to IDEs):

• SBT (Scala Build Tool), has some very nice features, including get Maven Artifacts, continuous compilation and testing, written in Scala;
• Maven does provide a good support for building (but you have to learn Maven);
• Specs is an awesome test framework

I like IDEA better then Eclipse, although the Eclipse has evolved well. I chose it because it worked better on refactors and has good support for Maven. Eclipse also support maven, but I felt IDEA's implementation better.

Now these tools are in constant improvement, and all of the have their strengths and weaknesses. Stability has improved a lot, and I felt productive in both Eclipse and IDEA. But my understanding is that the tooling is not at the same level the Java versions.

Answer 3

If your question applies during the time you are going through the book and in general when testing code snippets, a combination of any text editor, sbt and the REPL works well for me.

sbt has a "scratch" mode where it will compile scala you have in the current directory and import jar files automatically. The setup is to download sbt, create the sbt script/bat file, create the scratch project and change the scala version in project/build.properties.

You can then drop into the console and have your jars files in the classpath. You can also use the run command and it will prompt you for which class to run (if you have multiple ones in the current directory).