Scala at guardian.co.uk

Graham Tackley gives an overview of why we're using the Scala programming language

Graham Tackley

Published on Monday, 18 April 2011

Scala  

Content API explorer
Content API explorer Photograph: Public Domain

I recently gave a talk at the London Scala Users’ Group about our use and experiences of the Scala programming language.

The software behind theguardian.com is implemented using a fairly typical enterprise open source Java stack of Spring, Apache Velocity and Hibernate, with a proprietary relational database backend protected by memcached. This has served us pretty well, and as you see from the release notes posted in this developer blog we continue to be able to evolve and enhance this platform.

However, as a development team, we’re always looking for tools, technologies and techniques that enable us to deliver functionality faster. As part of this effort, when we implemented our Content API last year, we chose to use Scala. This has worked out really well for us, and we’re now choosing Scala by default for all new projects hosted on the Java Virtual Machine.

The video of the talk is online to watch. There’s also an interview over at InfoQ which covers a lot of the background of our experiences with Scala.

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