I have been unable to make much progress with learning Scala. I have absorbed some knowledge through the scala-user mailing-list, but really have been unable to complete any sort of focused practice. So instead, I am going to go through with some focused practice for work by learning enough Groovy to be dangerous.

The adoption of Groovy as our team's tool of choice for non-production tooling has been an under-current since the local No Fluff Just Stuff conference last year. There have been some as-you-have-time-for-it projects developed in Groovy by others in the team: data manipulation scripts, a Grails front-end to one of the more complicated database entities, a Grails front-end to some of the configuration in our app. I have also been playing with SoapUI, a web service testing tool, which allows for scripting through Groovy. This and the creep of Groovy into our regression test tool has led me to decide to put away Scala for the time being and focus on learning Groovy, which is much more applicable to my work at the moment.

My plan for entering into the Groovy arena is to provide a Gant version of our current build script in an experimental branch at work and let others see what it looks like. More to come...