Gawker Leverages Typesafe for Extreme Scale
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
- Europe
Country
- Hungary
- United States
Product
- Typesafe Platform
- Scala
- Akka
- Play
- Slick
Tech Stack
- JVM
- Scala
- Akka
- Play Framework
- Slick
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Innovation Output
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
- Factory Operations Visibility & Intelligence
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Gawker Media is a prominent publisher known for its influential media group, producing eight original brands with a collective audience of tens of millions of US readers. Founded in 2002 by Nick Denton, Gawker Media is recognized for its unique delivery of news, scandal, and entertainment. The company is the publisher of well-loved titles on the web, including Gawker and Gizmodo. Gawker Media attracts both fans and critics for its distinctive style, being described as 'deliciously wicked' and 'the biggest blog in the world.' The company experiences over 80 million unique page visitors monthly, highlighting its significant reach and influence in the digital media landscape.
The Challenge
After 7 years of PHP development, Gawker Media faced challenges in maintaining a large 300,000 line PHP codebase. Additionally, managing two separate production environments (LAMP and JVM) was making development inflexible and inefficient. Gawker maintained a development team split between New York and Budapest, with each team responsible for one technology. The current systems were built on a mix of Java and PHP, which made it difficult to share work across teams due to a lack of expertise. Moving to a common platform was necessary to concentrate development efforts on building the application instead of dealing with multiple environments and deployment processes. The new platform needed to provide a solid base to accommodate aggressive growth requirements. Gawker set upon evaluating the technology marketplace, aiming to leverage their experience with JVM-based solutions and ensure interoperability with existing Java components and libraries.
The Solution
Gawker Media's CTO, Tom Plunkett, led the search for a new platform, exploring technologies like Node.js, Python, and Django. However, these technologies were not complete enough to meet Gawker's requirements. Tom was interested in Functional Programming languages for their productivity and statically typed nature, leading him to Scala. Scala's strong functional programming features, multithreading support, and interoperability with Gawker's Java codebase made it a compelling choice. The adoption of Scala was influenced by its use by companies like Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, which had similar scaling requirements. Gawker had code running in production four months after starting the project, with a team of PHP developers learning Scala. The new system is highly modularized, allowing developers to move between projects easily. Gawker adopted additional components from the Typesafe Platform, including Akka, Slick, and Play, to enhance their development and deployment processes.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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