SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 14, 2016) - Lightbend (formerly Typesafe), the company behind the Reactive Platform that includes Play Framework, Akka, Lagom and Scala, today announced additional investment in the growth and innovation of the Scala programming language by supporting the launch of a new foundation, the Scala Center, as one of the original founding members.
Based in Lausanne, Switzerland at the EPFL, a world-leading research university, the Scala Center's mission is to help coordinate the Scala community and grow its ecosystem of tools and libraries and improve Scala's educational offerings. Lightbend joins Goldman Sachs, IBM, Nitro and Verizon as founding members of the new, independent, non-profit foundation.
"Scala is playing an increasingly important role in the new era of scale-out cloud computing, microservices and Reactive applications," said Martin Odersky, co-founder of Lightbend, creator of Scala, and professor at EPFL. "We're delighted to have Lightbend supporting the educational work by the foundation to foster innovations in and around the Scala language."
With the rise of Scala-based big data frameworks like Apache Spark and Apache Kafka, more and more organizations see Scala becoming more prominent among big data practitioners. The language has been heavily adopted by digital natives such as Twitter and Airbnb, as well as traditional enterprises including UniCredit, Morgan Stanley, The Guardian, and Norwegian Cruise Lines.
"We're committed to increasing the adoption of Scala by ensuring continuity of the team of core contributors," said Mark Brewer, CEO of Lightbend. "Lightbend employs half of the top-ten Scala contributors and will continue to drive Scala's design and implementation in collaboration with the Scala Center."
The new Scala Center, with support from its founding members and advisory board, will fund and sponsor initiatives that develop and maintain open source Scala libraries, create documentation and learning materials and develop various tools and services that benefit the Scala community as a whole. Odersky will help guide the Center along with Heather Miller of the EPFL and Jon Pretty, one of Scala's original 10 users.
Scala Center is also offering four massive open online courses (MOOC) on Scala this year. Odersky will teach courses on Functional Programming Principles in Scala and Functional Program Design in Scala. New courses offered through MOOC include Parallel Programming and Big Data Analysis in Scala and Spark.
Additional Materials
- Watch the Scala Center video
- Read the Lightbend blog post
About Lightbend
Lightbend (Twitter: @lightbend) is dedicated to helping developers build Reactive applications on the JVM. With the Lightbend Reactive Platform, developers can create message-driven applications that scale on multicore and cloud computing architectures by using projects like Lagom, Play Framework, Akka, Apache Spark, Scala, and Java. To help our customers succeed, Lightbend partners with technology pioneers such as Databricks, IBM, and Mesosphere. Lightbend is venture backed by Bain Capital Ventures, Greylock Partners, Juniper Networks and Shasta Ventures with headquarters in San Francisco.