geek evaluation

If somebody would have asked me few days back this question , I would not have known the answer. But I always wanted to find about the technology and tricks used at high performance sites like  twitter , facebook and ebay.

During discussions with one of the colleagues, I came to know that core of  twitter has been written in Scala. And that set me going . Twitter had really high load going to 5000 tweets per minutes at times.

I really wanted to find out more about Scala and learn about it.

What is Scala ?

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Many top-notch programmers and industry leaders have already been captivated by Scala. James Strachan even says that scala is the long term replacement of java and javac.

Find more about scala here

If I write it down today and say “I always told you so” , you would not believe me. But couple of years back while discussing with my friends and colleagues I was telling them that google has the best chance to give challenge to Microsoft in Operating Systems. It is not that google has best brains(I do not doubt that) but because it is following a very planned strategy. The reason for this was as follows :

When you own a computer , except all the computer game junkies and programmers most of us open up a browser ,surf internet, use MS office suites , email , listen songs or download pictures.

Since google had integrated its own application suite in the web, there was very little use of an Operating system. So why can’t a browser like Firefox(Chrome was not out then)not be installed  on Linux and sold to customers.

So on browser you surf internet , upload and share pictures. For work you can use google office suite which works very well within browser . So you do not need a full fledge OS.  A lightweight linux can be used and you save your $100 which you pay for OS.

And this I was saying before Chrome(Google’s browser ) was released.

Today google has announced they are launching Google Chrome Operating System in second half of 2010.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Read it here in google blog

Currently they are targeting net book , but no reason why it cannot be upgraded for laptops in coming years.

There is a lot of business learning from this piece of news and with what Microsoft has been doing for years. We will cover that in next post.