Over the past year, I’ve spent a fair amount of personal time studying the Scala programming language, a statically-typed and functional language that runs on the JVM.

An effective means of learning a new language is oftentimes as simple as writing small programs or libraries with well-defined boundaries. I’ve shared in a previous post my desire to build a better command line program for ZooKeeper. This work led to developing a more intuitive and functional Scala-based API over the ZooKeeper client library. Additionally, I factored out the option parsing code into its own project, primarily because of a need for simple option parsing in other areas.

All of these projects are listed on my Github page. Outside the scope of learning Scala, but a necessary step in facilitating the use of open source contributions, is deploying the artifacts of those projects to a central location. So, this led to an interesting and sometimes painful exercise in preparing the projects for deployment to the Central Maven Repository via Sonatype. The gains were worth the effort, though.

In the end, a successful deployment boils down to the practice of good software engineering discipline, as well as the inclusion of comprehensive documentation, which makes your contribution more accessible to others.