Today, 4 October 2010, Martin Odersky announced the founding of Scala Solutions [1] at the JAOO conference [2] in Denmark. The CEO and Chief Technology Officer said, "We have founded Scala Solutions to provide the advanced tools and services needed by Scala developers to create mission critical applications that are reliable, quick to develop and easy to maintain."
Companies like Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, The Guardian, Xerox, Sony, Siemens, Novell and EDF have all used Scala to run critical parts of their business. Scala Solutions will provide the essential products and services they and other companies need to confidently use Scala for creating vital business applications that are reliable and lower cost to maintain.
Scala Solutions will provide Scala stable previous version support starting with version 2.8. Companies with large integrated IT infrastructures need, for stability, to be able to keep existing version based applications running for 18 - 24 months after new versions are announced. Scala Solutions will provide this support by distributing updates with bug fixes for previous versions. Scala Solutions is also announcing that a Migration Manager will be available in January 2011. This tool enables applications compiled with a previous version of Scala to be scanned for binary incompatibilities and it will automatically heal, with minor exceptions, all binary compatibility problems by classfile rewriting. Together these two capabilities will allow commercial companies to use Scala confidently, sure that development investments are safe from version change erosion.
Martin explained that commercial companies need stability and the confidence that they can have ready access to the latest Scala features. In a competitve environment they cannot afford to stagnate and need practical solutions that allow stability but facilitate technology advance. To do this Scala Solutions has brought together an outstanding technical team of people that have a passion for programming, take pride in providing quality applications and are led by unrivalled experts in the field of professional Scala development. You can find out more about the team and products at Scala Solutions [1].
He went on to say that Scala's successes are due to its vibrant open source community. While Scala Solution's goal is to provide high added value to leverage the productivity of commercial developers, we will also provide improved open source tools to make development easier for everyone in the Scala user community.
Meanwhile, the research team here at EPFL will continue grow and advance knowledge in new areas such as parallelism, type systems, scheduling, embedding, language theory and domain specific languages with the intent of breaking new ground. Exciting new work is being done with Stanford using Scala to simplify applying the power of multi-core technology to common problems. Founded in 1853, EPFL has always had a long term commitment to research and a respected tradition of bring the benefits of the best work into everyday use. As research projects mature Scala will be enhanced with the new features that will give users better performance and capabilities.
Martin Odersky explains that with the two organisations users ultimately get the best of both worlds, a language that will incorporate the best new technology quickly and the support that commercial users need for stability and reliability.
Links:
[1] http://www.scalasolutions.com
[2] http://jaoo.dk/aarhus-2010/presentation/Scala at Work