Cloud Foundry to support Scala

The Cloud Foundry open source project has announced that it is adding support for Scala, the general purpose language. The Scala language integrates object-oriented and functional programming in a statically typed, JVM-based system. Announced by VMware in April 2011, Cloud Foundry is a PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) that allows clients to run their applications on VMWare's vSphere cloud platform and which is also available as an open source cloud framework. The developers have added the Scala framework Lift to Cloud Foundry's list of supported frameworks, which already includes Spring (Java), Grails (Groovy), Rails (Ruby), Sinatra (Ruby) and Node.js (JavaScript).

According to the developers, Scala applications that have been written to use Lift, and which follow its guidelines for externalising services, will deploy seamlessly to the Cloud Foundry platform without modification. Scala applications which use the Spring framework can also deploy easily by making use of auto-reconfiguration. Other Scala applications may require minor modifications to work with cloud services, though Scala apps that do not require those application services can be deployed directly regardless of the framework used. However, as most applications do require services such as databases, they will need to be modified. The posting gives details of the necessary changes, a guide to how to deploy and links to sample applications such as PocketChange.

Scala support is already available in the Cloud Foundry open source repository and will go live in the coming weeks on www.CloudFoundry.com.

(ehe)