Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Twitter On Scala

Posted by kdawson on from the going-off-the-rails dept.

machaut writes "Twitter, one of the highest profile Ruby on Rails-backed websites on the Internet, has in the past year started replacing some of their Ruby infrastructure with an emerging language called Scala, developed by Martin Odersky at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Although they still prefer Ruby on Rails for user-facing web applications, Twitter's developers have started replacing Ruby daemon servers with Scala alternatives, and plan eventually to serve API requests, which comprise the majority of their traffic, with Scala instead of Ruby. This week several articles have appeared that discuss this shift at Twitter. A technical interview with three Twitter developers was published on Artima. One of those developers, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead, gave a talk on this subject at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, which was covered by Technology Review and The Register."

4 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Who gives a shit about twitter? by snowraver1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously.

    --
    Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
  2. Useful! by castorvx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Twitter using new-and-fancy programming languages has a way of load testing them for all of us.

    I'm not sure I'd have the balls to take a 5 year old development platform/framework and drop it into something that sees so much traffic. Hopefully they share their experiences in some form.

  3. Re:Should have used PHP. by julesh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Difference is, Facebook is still using php, Twitter is going toScala.

    PHP was a mature environment when facebook was launched. RoR was (and still is to a certain extent) a fad environment, popular primarily because of its differentness. People who build sites on a platform because it's the latest thing are less likely to stick with that platform than people who choose a platform that has a solid reputation but is boring. Scala, at a guess, is going to be the next fad platform. Like Ruby, it has some interesting ideas behind it, but it needs a lot of development before we can consider a stable platform for serious applications, I think.

  4. Re:Should have used PHP. by tcopeland · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > Ruby is a language. Languages usually don't have problems with scalability.

    Quite right. An application with 8 million users will have scalability challenges regardless of what type of language opcodes are being executed. At some point it's all about architecture.

    --
    The Army reading list