Typesafe, a new startup co-founded by Martin Odersky, creator of the Scala language, launches to enable developers to create cloud and multicore applications in Scala.
With
new languages running on the Java Virtual Machine becoming increasingly
popular, the creator of Scala has launched Typesafe, a new company focused on
commercializing the language.
Typesafe, launched May 12, is known as the
Scala company. Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, co-founded the company with
Jonas Boner-Typesafe chief technology officer and creator of the Scala-based
Akka middleware project, touching off with $3 million in Series A financing led
by Greylock Partners.
The
company introduced the open-source Typesafe Stack, which integrates the most
recent releases of the Scala programming language, Akka middleware and
developer tools to simplify and accelerate software development with Scala.
Typesafe is offering commercial support and maintenance through the optional
Typesafe Subscription.
Created
by Typesafe co-founder and CEO Martin Odersky, Scala is a modern programming
language designed for multicore hardware architectures and cloud computing
workloads. Because it runs on the JVM, Scala offers interoperability with Java.
Scala has a rapidly growing community of users and contributors, and is proven
in production with some of the world's most highly trafficked Web properties,
including Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, Typesafe officials said.
"The
previous generation application architecture came from sequential computing and
it is running out of steam," Odersky said in a statement. "This shows in the
middleware stack, too. With Typesafe, we're introducing a modern software
architecture that is designed for parallel and distributed computing, bringing
huge advantages in scalability and reliability. Moreover, Typesafe is committed
to ensuring Scala is 100 percent interoperable with existing Java investments
in the enterprise."
Greylock
partner Bill Kaiser, who made a bet on open source as an early investor in Red
Hat, said of Typesafe in a statement: "With Moore's
Law now driving core counts instead of clock speed, we've entered the era of
-Big Cores.' Meanwhile, faced with the challenges of multicore and cloud
computing, the Java platform is at a crossroads. Scala is the only proven
alternative that solves these two computing challenges for big enterprises-and
Typesafe is the only company, with its people and technology IP, that can take
Scala to the mainstream."
Greylock
was joined in the Series A investment by individual investors including Chamath
Palihapitiya, vice president of Growth, Mobile and International at Facebook;
Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, founders of VMware; Francois Stieger, a
former executive at VeriSign, Broadvision, and Oracle; and Jeff Huber, senior
vice president of Commerce & Local at Google.
"Scala
has been a powerful programming tool for LinkedIn and has offered greater
scalability and efficiency towards our programming efforts," said Chris Conrad,
engineering manager at LinkedIn, in a statement. "We're glad to see the
creators of Scala launch Typesafe to further invest in the next generation of
programming languages."
Moreover,
to underscore its commitment to extending the Java ecosystem through
Scala, Typesafe also named to its board of advisors Java creator James Gosling
and Java concurrency expert Doug Lea. Willy Zwaenepoel, distributed and
parallel computing expert and professor at Switzerland's top technical
university (Ecole Polytechnique F??«d??«rale de Lausanne - EPFL), rounds out the
Typesafe advisory board.
The
Typesafe Stack offers a modern architecture for building scalable applications
that can handle multicore and cloud computing workloads. The stack is comprised
of the Scala language, Akka middleware and a set of developer tools including
the Scala IDE for Eclipse.
Typesafe
officials said Scala smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and
functional languages, enabling developers to be more productive and write more
scalable code while retaining full interoperability with Java. Scala
version 2.9, available for the first time today, adds support for parallel
collections that automatically "extract parallelism" to enable simple and
effective use of multicore hardware.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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