Scala at the NHS

Two new NHS (National Health Service, UK) websites are driven by Scala. The first, for the NHS Foundation Trust Network, is a content-managed website which provides all the latest news and information for existing and prospective foundation trusts within the NHS, and gives the site administrators complete control over their content. The second, the NHS Priority Selector, is a private interactive online application developed for the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement which enables a large number of disparate and distributed qualified individuals to take part in complex budgetary and policy decisions within the NHS.

The sites were developed by Bang, a UK company, specializing in brand consultancy, digital communications and rapid web development, for clients predominantly in the public sector.

Jon Pretty, Technical Director at Bang, chose Scala to develop the web framework his company uses as the basis for sites implementing client solutions. He says "Scala enables us to develop sites more quickly and make changes more responsively. For clients with rapidly-changing requirements, Scala's advanced type system enables us to facilitate large refactorings safely and with the confidence that they will "just work". The conciseness and expressiveness of the language saves our small team a vast amount of development time, and the ability to achieve higher levels of abstraction means we get much better code reuse, ultimately helping us deliver to our customers consistently on time and to budget."

Outside his work with Bang, Jon has used Scala technology to develop solutions for the student support services at Trinity College Cambridge and the NUHA Foundation, a charitable foundation encouraging education and learning in the Arabic-speaking world.