I'm looking for a meaningful task to learn Scala (something which is usable at the end and not only programming exercise), and I also have to make a forum, and I don't want to learn PHP... so I'm thinking about implementing an open source forum in Scala.
But does this make sense? Forums don't have high performance or scalability requirements... and also Java Hosting is more expensive, so even if my forum software is free, most people will not use it.
Am I missing use cases where forum written in Scala/Java makes sense, and is preferable over a PHP (or similar) forum?
I found for example this:
http://java-source.net/open-source/forum-software
But it seems to be abandoned, like stated here:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/497053/Ranch-Office/forum-has-been-built-JForum
So probably I'm correct that easy & cheap & slow is far more suitable for a forum = PHP?
I think an open source forum written in Scala would be useful if you can structure it in a way that makes it easy to integrate with existing web apps using the Lift and Play frameworks.
Your target audience should be anyone writing a web app in Scala who wants to tack on a forum. The prospect of using a php based solution won't be enticing to these developers, but neither will be reimplementing the wheel. You have a pretty compelling value proposition if you create a well written, easy to implement solution using the same stack that they are already leveraging.