The company formerly known as Typesafe, inventors of the Scala programming language, has completed their renaming and is now known as Lightbend. Typesafe announced their plans to rename last May, stating at that time that it was expected to be a two month process. They invited community members to participate, and provided blog updates about their progress.
The reason for the renaming was two-fold. Firstly, they were seeking a change in strategy, and secondly they felt the name Typesafe, a name that had become synonymous with Scala, was misleading. While Scala was at their core, they found that they were developing a reputation beyond Scala. They also found that the majority of their customers were using Java and other JVM languages other than Scala.
Mark Brewer, CEO of Lightbend, said in a blog post that the company is challenged to accelerate the adoption of its Reactive Platform, based on Play, Akka and Spark. They’ve started this process by publishing the Reactive Manifesto and leading the Reactive Streams specification (to be included in JDK 9).
Brewer also named Lagom microservices framework as their latest product to help developers adopt reactive architectures, (available on GitHub). Earlier this month InfoQ published an interview with Jonas Bonér, CTO of Lightbend, where he discussed Lagom.
Community reaction to the name change was somewhat reserved. Commentors on Brewer’s blog post (and Hacker News) felt that the company was moving away from Scala and towards Enterprise Java. Brewer followed up with a blog post answering questions on the name change, saying they remain fully committed to the Scala language. He also mentioned Logam would publish its Java API first, since it’s been challenging to convert the expressive Scala APIs in their products to Java.