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

Re:Should have used PHP.

[Foofoobar]

By that standard PHP or python doesn't have threads.

Never said PHP had threads. Hell even Twitter devs says Ruby doesn't have 'true' threads and that they are fake threads. As for LinkedIn and Hulu, watch how fast they dump Ruby; Hulu already is having problems. Seeing that scaling issue yet? PHP is used by PeopleSoft and Financial corporations who need scalability and stability. People who use Ruby apparently don't care about either.

And you seem to flip flop between saying 'Ruby is great on the backend' one second and the dnying it the next. Make up your mind. This is our entire argument about it's scalability. PHP IS the backend AND the frontend for all the sites that use it.

Ruby is just wrapping paper for another language like Scala that can actually scale. :)