I think you need to be able to quantify the risk versus reward for your clients. You should also be able to tell them how you mitigate some of that risk. For example, a lot of custom software is delivered in a half-baked state. If you deliver a half-baked product, and then move on to the next project, critical issues could go unaddressed for months while your client searches for another Scala developer (or other developer of sufficient caliber to learn Scala).
I don't think I'd recommend Scala/Lift for a project with less than three full or near full time developers. That's pretty small, but it eliminates an amazingly large number of projects. I would expect one of them to be sufficiently skilled (and motivated) to be able to contribute patches to the Scala library and to Lift. I would also expect that person, and one additional, to be very good at mentoring. The third would just need to be smart and open minded. If anyone finds assembling teams like this easy, I would like the contact information for your recruiter, so he can find me some people, too. Having multple people mitigates the bus risk. Hiring really good people can take months, so you basically have to always have someone in the wings. Having someone who can fix underlying problems in the library and framework mitigates (but does not eliminate) the "new technology" risk. Given a team like that, I think they could achieve great, great things with Scala and Lift. I think it would be significantly lower risk than a comparable Java or .NET project, especially one done with a mediocre team (or the common hero + legion of Java Joes). I think scaling up a large team with Scala would be hard due to recruiting and training, but as a language I think (don't know) the Scala is probably one of the best languages out there for large scale development. But I don' t think it is quite mature enough yet. On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 8:50 PM, efleming969 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Most questions in the group are technical and I apologize if this is > not appropriate, but I I'm curious about how members are justifying > their use of Scala+Lift vs. a traditional Java architecture. I > understand if you are creating applications for your own business or > personal use, but what about employee or consulting work (if any). > > I'm currently a one man consultant and would like to do more work with > Scala and Lift but it seems high risk for my client to have an > application built with newer and practically unknown technologies like > these. > > Any thoughts? > > > -- http://erikengbrecht.blogspot.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lift" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
