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by simplekoala 4630 days ago
Interesting you chose Scala. I have built and managed Jetty based adservers to talk to bidding exchanges and wondered how would the system perform if the adserver was written in Scala instead. Going with Jetty initially was the right choice as none on the team were experts in Scala, and the base assumption was that Jetty is battle tested, has good documentation and is already optimized to perform great from the get go. So, we simply chose Jetty. I didn't get a chance to build an equivalent system in Scala to compare performance. Will be great, if you can throw some light on how you went about building highly performant adservers in Scala, and scaled them. Does coding in Scala make it a lot more easy to deal with concurrency (for development and debugging), keeping a small codebase, help in rapid iteration, and in general make it fun to program and manage the servers? Do you have a blog post or a write up on this topic? I encourage you to make one, if you don't have one already. Good karma, and an opportunity to showcase your engineering chops to hire other great engineers.
1 comments

I wrote a simulation software to test a product in my previous job which used akka mostly but also used AHC which is a plain java http client library without problems. Size-wise the code would periodically get more features but by refactoring often it never got beyond 2500~3000 LOCs. Readability was never harmed; Scala - contrary to what some people think - allows for very clear code. People that inherited the code is working on adding features. Obfuscated code can be written in PHP if you want (or are unable to do otherwise). Another piece of scala software was an internal web service written using unfiltered on jetty. It's so stable sometimes I just forget it's there.