Scala on a Chromebook? Yes, we can!!!

A couple of weeks ago I got myself an Acer Chromebook and so far I am very happy with it. I use it as a tablet with a keyboard and carry it around with me a lot, but ...

... sometimes I have an hour to kill in a coffee shop and would like to do some software development (in my case and these days mainly Scala) and started to wonder, if and how this is possible.

The good news is ... you just have to think about it differently and (everything :)) becomes possible, means instead of running the software development environment on the box, you do what the Chromebook can do best and access a software development environment in the cloud (i.e. in my case an Ubuntu box on EC2).


The SSH shell that I have mentioned can be installed from the Chrome Store and then you just need to create yourself an AWS account, upload you public SSH key, need to launch an Ubuntu instance (m1.medium works), need to install a couple of packages and you are on your way.

The code I showed is a solution to Josephus Problem.

Some people said "It can't be done!". I say "Yes, we can!!!".