This blog is not dead

Wow. I can't believe it's been nearly a year since I started this blog - and nearly 11 months since I last posted anything! I took a little break, but I never intended for it to lie fallow for so long.

A prolonged silence of this sort could either indicate a lack of interesting developments to blog about, or that I've been so busy with a multitude of projects that I haven't had time to blog about any of them. Fortunately, it's the latter. I hope to "catch up" by posting about some of these projects in the near future, but in the meantime, here's a taste of what I've been up to:

• Learning Lift, the web framework for Scala
• Writing a plugin that allows Lift applications deployed to Google App Engine to access the App Engine APIs for Google Accounts and the BigTable datastore
• Getting paid (!) to write an role-based access control system, in Scala, for a Lift-based web application
• Giving a presentation on Lift to the Chicago-Area Scala Enthusiasts user group
• Developing a web app for a proprietary trading firm that pushes real-time market data, via Comet, to a web browser. (Yes, it was written in Lift, how did you guess?)

The flip side of all this Scala and Lift activity is that I haven't done any work with Groovy or Grails in quite some time. I never made a conscious decision to stop using Groovy and Grails, they just sort of fell by the wayside as I explored the Scala landscape.

That's not to say it's been "All Scala, all the time", though. Oh no, there have also been side trips into Git, Clojure, Haskell (Ouch!), iPhone Apps, and Cappucino. Probably a few others I can't remember right now.

It's been a busy - and productive - year. I promise not to make you wait another eleven months to hear about it.