Today Martin Odersky, the creator of the Scala language launches Typesafe as the premier Scala company. Developers will benefit immediately, with the release of the open source Typesafe Stack, integrating recent releases of the Scala programming language, Akka middleware and developer tools to enable rapid, simple Scala development. The company will also provide commerical support and maintenance through an optional Typesafe Subscription.

Highlighting their commitment to extending the Java ecosystem through Scala, James Gosling and Doug Lea, two giants of the Java community, are on the board of advisors for Typesafe.

Over the last few years, Scala, designed for multicore hardware architectures and cloud computing workloads, has proven itself in production: Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn all use Scala. 

“The previous generation application architecture came from sequential computing and it is running out of steam. This shows in the middleware
stack, too,” said Odersky. “With Typesafe, we’re introducing a modern software architecture that is designed for parallel and distributed computing, bringing huge advantages in scalability and reliability.Moreover, Typesafe is committed to ensuring Scala is 100 percent interoperable with existing Java investments in the enterprise.”

The company, with Oderskey co-founded with Jonas Bonér, is launching with some serious funding from Greylock. Bill Kaiser, one of the Greylock partners states: 

“With Moore’s Law now driving core counts instead of clock speed, we’ve entered the era of ‘Big Cores.’ Meanwhile, faced with the challenges of multicore and cloud computing, the Java platform is at a crossroads. Scala is the only proven alternative that solves these two computing challenges for big enterprises—and Typesafe is the only company, with its people and technology IP, that can take Scala to the mainstream.”

The Typesafe Stack

What will interest developers most is the Typesafe Stack. Here's some more detail on what's included: 

Scala

A general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala
smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling developers to be more productive and write more scalable code while retaining full interoperability with Java.  Scala version 2.9, available for the first time today, adds support for parallel collections that automatically “extract parallelism” to enable simple and effective use of multicore hardware.

Akka Middleware

Akka is an event-driven middleware framework for building high performance and reliable distributed applications. Akka decouples business logic from low-level mechanisms such as threads, locks and non-blocking I/O. Akka version 1.1, available for the first time today, builds on the recent 1.0 release by offering improved packaging, performance, and scalability.

Developer Tools

The Scala IDE for Eclipse provides a rich development environment with syntax highlighting, code completion, and integrated debugging. Scala IDE version 2.0, in beta today, was recently rebuilt from the ground-up by Typesafe for improved performance and stability.  Complementing the IDE, Simple Build Tool (sbt) automates compilation and dependency management of Scala and Java projects.

If you've been thinking about using Scala, perhaps these words from some of the biggest users of the language will convince you: 

“Scala has been a powerful programming tool for LinkedIn and has offered greater scalability and efficiency towards our programming efforts. We're
glad to see the creators of Scala launch Typesafe to further invest in the next generation of programming languages,” said Chris Conrad, Engineering
Manager at LinkedIn.

Alex Payne, former Platform Lead at Twitter and now CTO of online banking startup BankSimple, commented

“Scala played a critical role in improving the scalability and reliability of Twitter's backend services. At BankSimple, our team is using both Scala and Akka to build a flexible architecture that allows us to rapidly integrate with our partners and scale predictably when needed. We're happy to know that the brilliant people at Typesafe are supporting Scala and Akka with a comprehensive set of commercial services."

James Governor, analyst at RedMonk states 

"We're entering a polyglot era in software development, driven by cloud and multicore systems architectures, as new languages emerge to challenge, and coexist with, the long hegemony of Java and .NET. Typesafe is a commercial business aiming to catalyze momentum around Scala, one of the languages building real grassroots interest and adoption at sites such as Twitter and The Guardian."

Typesafe will be participating in Scala Days 2011, the premier annual event for Scala enthusiasts, researchers and practitioners, at Stanford University
on June 2-3, 2011. Typesafe will also be offering Scala and Akka training courses on May 31 and June 1 at Stanford, preceding the Scala Days conference.