Twitter On Scala

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."

Comments

Mod Up

[Jane Q. Public]

The problems they had were not due to Rails. The problems arose from poor implementation of their message queue... some bad engineering decisions.

http://unlimitednovelty.com/2009/04/twitter-blaming-ruby-for-their-mistakes.html

And some of their recent Scala noise might be due to the fact that Alex Payne just wrote a book about Scala that was just released, or is about to be.