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Home » About Scala » In the
Enterprise

Scala in the Enterprise

Created by admin on 2009-06-12. Updated:
2009-07-30, 07:48

The Scala programming language is used by many companies to develop
commercial software and production systems; please find below some notable
examples. Your company can also benefit from using Scala, just like
them!

Twitter

Twitter provides an extremely popular
real-time messaging service, which allows friends, family, and co-workers to
stay in touch.

Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, gave a fascinating
presentation at Web 2.0
Expo San Francisco, 01 April 2009 about why Twitter uses Scala. He explains
why they like the language, how they have gained performance with it and the
difficulties they encountered on the way. You may like to take a look at his
presentation slides or read reports on the talk by: Kate Greene
from Technology Review, Nicole
Ferraro from Internet Evolution, or Cade Metz from
The Register.

To handle the peak rates of Tweeting, 5000
per minute during the Obama Inauguration, each tweet causing hundreds of
posts to followers, Robey Pointer at Twitter has moved their main message queue
from Ruby to Scala for improved performance. He explains the concepts behind the
Twitter
Kestrel project on his live journal and the more
concise 1500 lines of Scala code can be seen as open source project here.

Bill Venners from Artima, had the opportunity to talk to
three of the Twitter developers, Steve Jenson, Alex Payne and Robey Pointer.
They have created and upgraded one of the fastest growing social messaging
services in the world. You can learn what they think of Scala, how they use it,
and understand about some of the benefits they have gained from their
move.

Électricité de France Trading

Électricité de France (EDF) is the largest
French energy company. EDF
Trading (EDFT) is the subsidiary of EDF that operates on the
energy market: when the energy markets were liberalized, power became a tradable
commodity, and it became possible to buy and sell future capacity just like
other financial instruments. More in general, EDFT operates "to source, supply,
transport, store, blend, and convert physical commodities across the wholesale
energy markets". Over the past few years their development team, led by Alex
McGuire, has replaced a substancial part of their 300,000 lines of Java code for
energy derivatives trading and pricing with Scala code. EDFT has seen a
significant increase in development productivity and much improved interfaces
for their users, the Power traders.

Alex McGuire says, that in this mission critical business application,
Scala plays an important part in the implementation and is impressed by
Scala. Alex, a mathematician and former options trader, has over 15 years of
development experience creating financial trading applications.

EDFT considered that the Scala
IDE for Eclipse was crucial to their development effort, and directly
funded Miles Sabin, Chuusai Ltd, to add the features they
required and to make it the production-quality IDE it is today.

Reaktor

Reaktor is a Finnish software company,
employing 110 people, providing software development and software development
consulting services to many of the large Finnish companies. Their software
services are mostly targeted at Finnish market although the products are often
deployed around the world and used by millions of people.

The cornerstones of the company are unparalleled technological expertise, the
best experts in the field, high quality products and services and the drive to
always succeed. Reaktor, an exciting and progressive company, was ranked the
best workplace in Finland and number two in Europe in 2009. At Reaktor, people
always come first.

In the last two years developers at Reaktor have become enthusiastic about
Scala, started introducing the language into new development projects and now
recommend the technology to their customers.

In one case, Scala was chosen as a solution for a mobile game logic DSL, in a
system now deployed around the world. The top level Scala script bundled
together more fundamental elements. The resulting package has been used more
extensively since.

In another, Scala was used to implement a Web based home security system.
Scala's xml API was particularly effective for interacting with a third party
provided xml-over-http service.

According to Hannu Terävä, Chief Technology Officer, "Ultimately the client
decides what technologies we use; I believe that we will see more and more Scala
projects in the future."

Siemens boosts productivity with
ESME

On March 4, 2009, Siemens announced the availability of Enterprise
Social Messaging Experiment (ESME), an application based on the Lift WebFramework and Scala. ESME is an Open Source tool
designed by Siemens IT Solutions and Services together with SAP Community
specialists. The product is aimed at boosting productivity in enterprises with
efficient social networks. Richard Hirsch, project manager for ESME at Siemens
says "ESME helps to build communities and thus fosters efficient, company-wide
communication between employees".

Darren Hague, SAP Mentor and ESME team lead briefly explains here why the team chose Lift and Scala
as the basis of this application. You can learn more about the project
background and the teams technical architectural decisions here.
You may like to try a version of the ESME user interface here or see the Siemens desktop
implementation here.

You can also read an interview where Vassil Dichev, one of the
community of programmers dedicated to developing ESME, talks about his experiences with Scala.

Others

We have received many reports about Scala in the enterprise, in particular we
heard news about Xerox and Office Depot adopting Scala as well; we are in the
process of obtaining more information.

Meanwhile, please find below some of the Scala deployments we heard about; we
are unable to verify all of them at this time, but we will update the list
as we receive more precise information.

We hear reports that Sony
Pictures Imageworks uses Scala to write middle-tier software,
from the management of terabytes of digital assets to disk storage and disk
backup management; that is according to the information contained on this page.
Sony ImageWorks' website is at http://www.imageworks.com/

Scala is also being used in the scientific publishing group Nature, for building
various restful APIs. The contact is Peter Kovac, who also reports that some
of their new online products are also going to be Scala-based. http://www.nature.com/

Scala is reportedly used in Managed Gaming
Solutions Plc's high-availability system for national lotteries,
the Jetbet™ Platform. Developed in collaboration with Reaktor. Their website: http://www.mgscorporation.com/.
(Reported by Jakub Järvenpää)

Triental,
a wealth management company, based in Uppsala, Sweden, also uses Scala.
Contact: Jonas Bonér, Triental AB, http://www.triental.com/

Scala is in use at Sygneca; it was used on a
number of projects, including several for the UK government over the last
three years. They reportedly have further Scala use cases in the private
sector. Contact: Jon Pretty, Sygneca, http://www.sygneca.com/

AD Holdings
(CCTV systems) also uses Scala. Contact: Ricky Clarkson. http://www.ad-group.co.uk/

The company SAIC
(government contracting in the USA) is using Scala on a project to provide a
RESTful and XML-RPC API. Contact: Michael Fogus, SAIC, http://www.saic.com/

A French company based in Paris, Mimesis Republic,
is using Scala to develop a new MMO. Contact: Stephane Le Dorze, Technical
Director, Mimesic Republic, http://www.mimesis-republic.com/

WattzOn, http://www.wattzon.com/, a social energy
auditing site, is entirely coded in Scala. WattzOn is a joint effort of Synthesis Studios, a technology
design firm in Boston, Massachusetts, US, http://www.synthesisstudios.com//,
and Makani Power, Alameda,
California, http://www.makanipower.com/home.html.
Contact: Raffi Krikorian

You can use Scala to make software development more efficient in your
company, just like Twitter, Siemens, and the other companies above have done. If
you have already started developing Scala software for your company,
and you would like to let us know more, please just send us a quick message.

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