New Adventures with Play, Scala, and Akka at Typesafe

Posted by: James Ward on 10/15/2012

Today I’m heading out on a new adventure at Typesafe, the company behind Play Framework, Scala, and Akka!

The past year and a half at Heroku have been really amazing. Not only have I enjoyed teaching others about Heroku, I’ve enjoyed my own frequent use of Heroku. It says something when a technology switch makes one never want to go back to the way it was done before. This is the experience that I (and many others) have had with Heroku. I can’t imagine going back to managing servers and painful deployments. I’m certainly a Heroku Evangelist for Life, but it’s time for a new adventure.

Typesafe is assembling a platform that is quickly becoming the foundation for next generation software. Working with the Typesafe technologies has been a delight and has opened my eyes to the future of scalable software. To build more scalable applications we need better programming models for asynchronous and concurrent code. Web applications are also transitioning to a modern Client/Server architecture where the Client is executed in the browser via JavaScript and the Server is RESTful JSON services.

The Typesafe Stack brings together a scalable foundation and a modern web framework to form a platform that is perfect for the next generation of software. I’m incredibly excited to continue learning Play, Scala, and Akka while also helping other developers do the same!

Working at Heroku has been a magnificent adventure and I’m sad to see it end. I will certainly continue showing off Heroku and using it myself, especially combined with the Typesafe Stack!


About James Ward

James Ward

James Ward (www.jamesward.com) works for Typesafe where he teaches developers the Typesafe Stack (Play Framework, Scala, and Akka) . James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80′s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90′s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. In 2011 James became a Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com where he taught developers how to deploy apps on the cloud with Heroku. James Tweets as @_JamesWard and posts code at github.com/jamesward.

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