Two 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, Scala artifacts are now available directly from Maven Central. The contents of scala-tools.org are now integrated into the Sonatype OSS repository hosting service, and other projects have started to publish artifacts Central.
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.
How did this happen? Joshua Suereth, David Bernard, and Derek Chen-Becker provided the bulk of the administrative work, and they recently decided to decommision this server and transition repository hosting to the free Sonatype OSS service. Here's the announcement by Joshua Suereth to the user forums on scala-lang.org on January 17th:
Scala-tools.org is going down and not accepting any new OSS projects. For those of us who wish to continue release software, I recommend migrating over to Sonatype. They put a few (good practice) limitations on contributions, but scala-tools.org would have done the same before long anyway. The benefit of Sonatype hosting is that your projects will make it onto the maven-central repository and benefit from the myriads of mirrors. Here's the link for how to get started contacting Sonatype: http://nexus.sonatype.org/oss-repository-hosting.html
If you maintain a project that previously published to the scala-tools.org repository, here are three resources that provide guidance for Scala developers looking to publish Scala artifacts to Central: