I can't agree more - I've been doing a non-trivial bit of scala work in the past six months, and the part that seems the most lacking to me is JSON support. Every scala JSON library I've used (spray-json, sbjson, lift-json and the like) requires you to define a concrete serializer class for every single type you would like to move across the wire. I really miss the ease of use of reflection-based parsers like Jackson. I've alleviated a bit of this by writing a generic serializer that uses Jackson under the hood, but that requires every class to use a java bean pattern, and not the more elegant scala case class (or frankly plain old scala object) patterns.
There's a project called Jerkson that is attempting to fix this, but I'd like to see all the major scala frameworks just settle on something good and simple and go from there.
There's a project called Jerkson that is attempting to fix this, but I'd like to see all the major scala frameworks just settle on something good and simple and go from there.