Scala/Lift is pretty new technology, and most of its success stories are about scaling. So unless you really expect to have huge performance demands from the ve

Scala/Lift is pretty new technology, and most of its success stories are about scaling. So unless you really expect to have huge performance demands from the very start or would have a huge advantage if you could leverage Java libraries, I'd say that you'd get more mileage out of Ruby on Rails. Functional languages do have the advantage that most programmers that know them tend to be quite good, but I don't know if this is as true for Scala as it would be for Lisp, Haskell or Ocaml, as it seems that a lot of Scala programmers aren't in the functional camp, but more in the fed-up-with-Java one. And the quality of Java developers is all over the place…