PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Cloud Foundry Supports Scala

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Cloud Foundry (previous CloudAve coverage), VMware’s attempt at multi cloud PaaS, today announced that they are supporting Scala, a language for highly scalable applications and platforms. Cloud Foundry was earlier supporting Spring, Rails and Node.js. Since Cloud Foundry platform is designed to support multiple application frameworks, adding support for additional languages is very easy. For every framework, they offer an appropriate runtime. With support for Scala, Cloud Foundry can target developers keen on building highly scalable applications.

What is Scala?

Scala is a general purpose programming language that elegantly combines the features of object oriented and functional languages which lets developers express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant and type-safe way. It helps Java and other developers be more productive and, also, helps in application scalability and overall reliability. It allows writing compact and robust programs for greater focus on core business logic.

What makes Scala attractive?

The biggest attraction to Scala for modern applications is its scalability. Many companies that rely on Java use Scala to ensure scalability for their business critical applications. For example, most of us are familiar with Twitter fail whale during its initial years. They initially used Ruby for their core message queue and there were troubles scaling beyond a certain point. Once they moved the core message queue to Scala, they could easy scale to meet the needs of fast growing Twitter users.

Why is Scala interesting on Cloud Foundry?

Scala is a JVM based language and, hence, offers easy interoperability with Java ecosystem. Since Cloud Foundry already supports Spring, this announcement will make developers happy. Most Scala applications written to Lift and Spring can be seamlessly deployed on Cloud Foundry without any modifications. Other Scala applications can also be easily deployed with minor modifications.

So?

Even though this is not a path breaking news, this goes on to highlight the application framework neutral capability of Cloud Foundry. In this regard, this news is interesting. Plus, Scala support will help spur more developer interest to the Cloud Foundry platform. VMware easily revved up lots of interest among the developers when they announced Cloud Foundry platform. With support for additional framework, they can establish themselves as a PaaS player to beat in the coming years.