Also check out the lift web framework, written in Scala<p><a href="http://liftweb.net/" rel="nofollow">http://liftweb.net/</a><p>Highlights (from link):<p><i>Advanced Framework</i><p>Lift has a number of great features for web developers. Many inspired from existing frameworks like Seaside, Rails, Django, TurboGears, and Wicket:<p><pre><code> * Comet support is easy to add and scalable
* Mapping between databases and code is easy (Rails)
* Content and code are well separated (Wicket, TurboGears)
* Forms are secure by default (Seaside)
* Convention over configuration is emphasized, no xml hell (Rails)
* Component model makes pages elements easier to create and maintain (Wicket)
* Prebuilt classes are provided for standard functions, e.g. User (Django)
* Semantic information carries from model to enable smart display. e.g. postal code, social security number, email address
* State machine support for model objects, including timeouts. e.g. after 3 days w/o confirmation, delete this new account
* Site Map provides site wide navigation and access control support </code></pre>
For a while, they called Scala the ocaml-killer. Because it is fully interoperable with Java, it enjoys a huge standard library, which is one of the main pitfalls when writing ocaml code. I'm not sure it ever really caught on, though. Scala is a nice functional language with a rich type system built on java byte code, and is similar in concept to Microsoft's offering on the .NET platform: F#