Last night worked with Eli on setting up Netbeans 6.7, scala, lift, environment vars, and a test project. Ran into some problems getting it working on his setup (he had to setup stuff in windows, originally was working linux). Either way learned some things about how the project works. working Mon-Wed will do what I can in evenings but not much cooking till later in the week.
Scala with lift is a little more complicated to get working than php (installation, a little more getting used to what/how it works), but will make things much easier later (pretty awesome language utilities)