Ever since I started programming Scala in the Play! framework I’ve been absolutely floored by the lack of an interactive console in play! and play-scala.

Up until a week or two ago I’ve been programming heavily in Cocoa on the Mac version of our uploader, but since we launched Gush publicly last week I’ve been neck-deep in play! work. Things got rough, the framework started fighting back, and I was immediately reminded how much I love using a console. So I went digging (again), and the state of things was so dismal that I thought it warranted a blog post (and restarting my entire blog).

what happened?

Well, play-scala used to have a command called scala:console that brought up a wicked sweet console a la rails console. Then f59224658cc6cc12efee1a7e6cf593c8ada20589 happened on Jan. 11, 2011; For no obvious reason other than “Global refactoring and cleaning” guillaumebort dropped Console.scala out of existance. What gives?

This time around I dig some digging and managed to find some old posts referencing trouble with readLine and apparently even the author of sbt had tried chiming in to help. Since then, however, there doesn’t appear to be any chatter other than this ticket on lighthouse, which I commented on over three months ago with no response from Guillaume.

the rant

Frankly I think it’s unacceptable to not have an interactive console in a web framework, but apparently the rest of the play! and play-scala community gets by fine without it. What are these people using when they need to closely observe behaviour!? I’ve tried using Eclipse with the Scala IDE plugin, and heck, one time I even got a scala console open that had included some Play! stuff, but I’ve never been able to consistently get Eclipse to do anything other than tell me I have hundreds upon hundreds of source errors - even when there aren’t any.

As a result I’m back to vim, but still no easy way other than the slow and painful cycle of: write code -> refresh page -> watch console.

living with it

What now? Well Gush is pretty much the best (we’re hiring, btw) and I get to spend 20% of my time on an open-source project of my choosing. I think I’m going to be contacting Guillaume directly and doing whatever I can to get scala:console back into play-scala < 1.0 and get scala:console into play 2.0.

Mr. Bort, await my call (or message).