Up to a few weeks ago, all Scala projects required a little bit of extra configuration to point to a custom repository for Scala artifacts hosted at scala-tools.org. Today, life has got that much easier, Scala artifacts are now available directly from Maven Central and Scala-tools will be retired. The contents of scala-tools.org have been integrated into the Sonatype OSS repository hosting service [1], and other projects have already started to publish artifacts on Maven Central.
This is great news for the Scala community. The big benefit of Sonatype hosting is that your projects will now be on Maven Central and that gives huge benefits for your users. There are myriads of mirrors to give fast downloads, guaranteed access and a well established solid commercial company backing the distribution of your artifacts. It makes Scala much easier to use and gives the eco-system the robustness needed for the expanding commercial user community.
Josh Sureth explains, "There are a few, good sense, good practice limitations on contributions compared to those you would have had on Scala-tools.org, but overall the process is so much better and hugely worth the minor inconvenience. Scala-tools.org is going to be retired soon, so nows the time to move your projects over to Sonatype. You can find how to do that at the Sonatype site [1]."
You can find more about the new service in the Sonatype blog [2]. Importantly they say, "The Scala community will see immediate benefits from this move. There are no more extra repositories to configure. It just got incrementally easier to use Scala. If you are new to Scala, you don’t need to reconfigure your repository manager to proxy another remote repository. The community will benefit from Sonatype’s continued investment in the infrastructure that runs Central: a cluster of machines in both the US and the EU continuously monitored by a dynamic DNS server that can reroute traffic instantly in the event of downtime."
Another good step forward for Scala.
Links:
[1] http://nexus.sonatype.org/oss-repository-hosting.html
[2] http://www.sonatype.com/people/2012/02/scala-artifacts-now-on-central/