Startup company Typesafe is launching on Thursday a software stack anchored by the Java Virtual Machine-compatible Scala programming language and geared toward parallel and distributed computing environments.

Typesafe is headed by CEO Martin Odersky, who developed Scala, and has Java founder James Gosling on its board of advisors. Odersky said he first released Scala seven years ago because "I saw that we would need to change our programming style and methodologies for this new world of concurrency and parallelism." The company's open source Typesafe Stack includes the Scala runtime as well as Akka middleware and developer tools. With its open source stack, Typesafe is seeking to take Scala to mainstream enterprise development and will offer subscription-based commercial support and maintenance.

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The Typesafe architecture is designed for parallel and distributed computing and offers scalability and reliability advantages, the company said. Scala itself is geared to multicore architectures and cloud computing workloads and is interoperable with existing enterprise Java investments. The language integrates object-oriented and functional language features. "Functional programming is essentially programming without changing state," Odersky said.

Akka middleware offers an event-driven framework for building high-performance applications, said Typesafe. Business logic is decoupled from low-level mechanisms such as threads, locks, and non-blocking I/O. Akka, which is written in Scala, supports concurrency for applications such as financial systems, which can be distributed over several computers and have results merged. Also featured with the Typesafe stack is the Scala IDE for Eclipse, which offers syntax highlighting, code completion, and integrated debugging.

Typesafe also will offer tools for monitoring and management.

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