Flowdock Scales Messaging with Akka for Enhanced Team Collaboration
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
- Europe
Country
- Finland
- United States
Product
- Scala
- Akka
- Typesafe Reactive Platform
Tech Stack
- Scala
- Akka
- Ruby on Rails
- JavaScript
- CoffeeScript
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
Applicable Industries
- Software
- Professional Service
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Collaboration
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Flowdock, founded in Helsinki, Finland in 2009, is a company dedicated to creating a seamless and productive team collaboration experience. The company's mission is to transform teams into a singular thinking organism with a shared memory and brain, enhancing team productivity and communication. Flowdock was initially a Ruby on Rails consulting shop, and its founder, Otto Hilska, drew from his experience to develop a low-friction collaboration tool. The tool aimed to provide a shared team inbox with group chat capabilities, allowing teams to stay up-to-date and react quickly. Flowdock integrates activity from project management tools, version control systems, and customer feedback channels into a single stream, enabling teams to work together efficiently.
The Challenge
Flowdock faced the challenge of creating a low-friction collaboration tool that could act as a shared team inbox with group chat capabilities. The goal was to enable teams to stay up-to-date, react quickly, and integrate various project management tools, version control systems, and customer feedback channels into a single, easily consumable stream. The core-messaging module needed to be highly performant and scalable to handle substantial server-side infrastructure traffic. The team initially considered using Ruby on Rails, but the core-messaging module required a more robust solution. Node.js was considered but had limitations, and Erlang lacked Java interoperability. The team was interested in the Actor model, which led them to explore Scala and Akka from Typesafe.
The Solution
To address the need for a highly performant and scalable core-messaging module, Flowdock chose to work with Scala and Akka from Typesafe. Scala is a general-purpose programming language that integrates object-oriented and functional language features, enabling developers to be more productive. Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant event-driven applications. The combination of Scala and Akka allowed Flowdock to build a massively scalable and highly concurrent application. The Flowdock team, despite having no prior experience with Scala, learned it while building the core-messaging service. The service was deployed to production within a couple of months and continued to be developed iteratively over nine months. The core-messaging service comprises approximately two thousand lines of Scala code, benefiting from Scala's concise nature and Akka's rich functionality. This allowed the team to focus on business logic rather than low-level tasks.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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