Foursquare move to Scala/Lift

Foursquare [1] is a fast growing service that back in July 2009 both the Washington Post [2] and Mashable [3] were tipping as a potential "breakout hit" or "next Twitter". Foursquare provides a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. It aims to keep you up with the places your friends go, and encourage you to discover new places and explore your neighborhood. Ever more people are enjoying the discovery experience.

With a rapidly growing base of hundreds of thousands of users Harry Heymann at Foursquare decided to move all the services to Scala/Lift [4] based servers.

Harry recently announced to the Lift community [5] that this high profile, heavy duty web server application had been ported to the Scala/Lift web framework. He explained that the conversion took a surprisingly short time, just 3 months. The Foursquare website, a mobile website (m.foursquare.com) and a simple(but growing!) REST api (api.foursquare.com) are all now running on Lift. Average post rates of over 1 per second and peaks several orders of magnitude larger. Harry says that they found Lift's view-first architecture well suited to interactive, AJAX-infused pages and an easy transition to make.

As well as thanking the Lift community and David Pollak for their great support Harry says, "they've built a really great framework, and I look forward to using it and seeing it grow for many years to come."