This weekend I took to teaching myself scala. I did so in a ubuntu VM on my wife's iMac. As usual when I try a java project, I spend more time getting my environment up than programming. In the spirit of my Creating a minimally viable Centos instance for SSH X11 Forwarding post, I've put my notes up here for myself, and anyone else who might benefit from them.
I decided to go with the open source community edition of IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains as my IDE (after using vim and bash to create and run the simple one file examples. I'm a big fan of their ReSharper and dotTrace profiler products for .NET, so if I end up doing more Java I will likely buy an IntelliJ license.
First some notes on setting up the VM itself:
- I used a trial of Vmware Fusion because I could not install Ubuntu on the existing Parallels 6.0 hypervisor.
- 1024 gigs of ram is not enough. Firefox and IntelliJ start swapping excessively and getting slow. 2048 is enough. I didn't try to turn the ram down anymore.
- One CPU core has proven to be enough.
Now setting up
- I installed IntelliJ from the ubuntu store. Didn't figure out the command line way of doing it
- No need to install scala. sbt will install its own version, in typical java fashion.