Beyond Java: Ruby on Rails with Scala backend
Twitter on Scala
A Conversation with Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointer
by Bill Venners
April 3, 2009
Summary
Three Twitter developers, Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointer, talk with Bill Venners about their use of Scala in production at Twitter.
Twitter is a fast growing website that provides a micro-blogging service. It began its life as a Ruby on Rails application, and still uses Ruby on Rails to deliver most user-facing web pages. But about a year ago they started replacing some of the back-end Ruby services with applications running on the JVM and written Scala. In this interview, three developers from Twitter—Steve Jenson, system engineer; Alex Payne, API lead; and Robey Pointer, member of the service team—sit down with Bill Venners to discuss Twitter's real-world use of Scala. They describe the production issues that led them to consider Scala in the first place, what issues they ran into using Scala in production, and how Scala affected their programming style.