The Guardian was recently profiled by Typesafe, custodians of the Scala programming language, about our use of their technologies to power our web presence. The full paper by our Head of Architecture Graham Tackley is available on the Typesafe blog, and an extract can be found below.
When Alan Rusbridger, Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News and Media revealed plans to become a digital-first organization, placing open journalism on the web at the heart of its strategy, the pressure was on to quickly modernize The Guardian’s existing web infrastructure.
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Moving an entire team to Scala didn’t happen overnight but Scala protects your investment in existing Java libraries, tools, and developer programming skills. Scala programs are compiled directly to Java bytecode that runs on the extremely mature Java Virtual Machine, and leverages the JVM’s robust just-in-time compilation, garbage collection, and well understood deployment techniques. The operations team won’t see a difference. Developers keep working in their familiar tools, begin writing Scala in a Java format, however they’re writing code that’s shorter, faster, more scalable, more correct, and even more fun
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As a result of the amazing success that The Guardian has seen utilizing Scala and Play across multiple projects, their architectural standards now dictate Scala as the de facto language, and Play as the web front-end.
Read more from Graham in the full report, featured on the Typesafe blog.