nice to see btcd getting more usage, goldmar :)

for the related blog entry with some more details, check out

http://markgoldenstein.com/building-websocket-client-btcwall...

we just recently released a small library that makes using the JSON-RPC much easier, and it should work with both bitcoind and btcd

https://github.com/conformal/btcrpcclient

this makes some of the things mark mentioned a bit less painful, e.g. marshal/unmarshaling the JSON, error handling, async replies. it is in go, so it might not be immediately useful to scala devs.