Scala + Play

Many moons ago, I was a web developer.  I created my own web framework, developed a bunch of libraries (charting, scraping, etc.), wrote articles and everything.  I even managed to created a website that had close to a million views in a month, and that was mentioned in a PopSci article.  I've tried to keep up with web technology over the years, but haven't really had the need to do much web development and am far behind the curve.

Every once in a while I get the urge to start a project involving the web.  I end up spending a bunch of time reading about some new language or technology, and don't really get much actual coding done before I lose interest or catch a glint of something shiny in another corner.  (This is a recurring story for me that is definitely not limited to web initiatives.)

Anyway, I'm back to thinking about the web this time because I really want a good tool that can automate (more of) the ice scheduling that I do for my daughter's hockey association.

I have written some code towards this purpose already, but it's just a C# command-line app that performs some web scraping to pull in all team schedules into an aggregated list for a given week (impossible using the current navigation on the site).  I've also made some false starts toward a more powerful desktop form-based app to automate things, but that approach never sat well with me.

1. I want to be able to access this from anywhere, including my phone or tablet.
2. I want to be able to let other associations use the tool, if it works well.
3. I don't really want to tie it to Windows, and would prefer to push my skill-set

So here I am, reading about Scala.  This is a hybrid object-oriented/functional language that is definitely cross-platform (runs on the JVM), and has web frameworks like Play, which is less like a Java servlet environment, and more like PHP.

Let's see how far I get this time.