Java programmers, interested in learning about Scala ? If you have missed our earlier posts on scala

Twitter has been written in which programming language

Why did twitter dumped Ruby on Rails

For new England residents a chance to learn Scala with Venkat Subramaniam who will be presenting on Programming Scala on Aug 12 2010  at  NEJUG.

Venue : Sun Microsystems, Burlington , MA

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of “.NET Gotchas,” coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning “Practices of an Agile Developer,” author of “Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer” and “Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine” (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

For folks who are not aware and often ask Which programming language is twitter written  in , the answer is, Scala. Developer at twitter had started with Rub on Rails but looks like they the high volume of traffic was too much for twitter or Ruby on rails ?

Their programmers have been saying

One of the things that I’ve found throughout my career is the need to have long-lived processes. And Ruby, like many scripting languages, has trouble being an environment for long lived processes. But the JVM is very good at that, because it’s been optimized for that over the last ten years. So Scala provides a basis for writing long-lived servers, and that’s primarily what we use it for at Twitter right now.

There could be other reasons which we are not ware of but there have been some real word applications build upon Ruby on rails, noticeably  cookfood.com which went public last year. So it is not that Ruby on Rails sucks.

If it comes to poor garbage collection in Ruby on rails , then there is an option to use JRuby . One of the very well written comments on this topic can be found here .

Just because twitter uses Scala and has dumped Ruby on rails does not imply anything. The architect team has to decide what works for them. What may work for twitter does not mean it will work for everyone else.

If somebody would have asked me few days back this question , I would not have known the answer. But I always wanted to find about the technology and tricks used at high performance sites like  twitter , facebook and ebay.

During discussions with one of the colleagues, I came to know that core(the back end services) of  twitter has been written in Scala. And that set me going . Twitter had really high load going to 5000 tweets per minutes at times.

Update : Thanks to the comments posted by users, especially Dave who have informed that the front end has been written in Ruby on Rails.

I really wanted to find out more about Scala and learn about it.

What is Scala ?

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Many top-notch programmers and industry leaders have already been captivated by Scala. James Strachan even says that scala is the long term replacement of java and javac.

Find more about scala here

I will be covering more about Scala in next post and how is it more efficient over Java.