Heroku, the platform-as-a-service company owned by Salesforce.com, will launch full support for Scala as early as next week the company has confirmed. Heroku VP of Product Oren Teich says Heroku has a formal partnership with Typesafe, a company co-founded by Scala creator Martin Odersky to provide enterprise support for Scala and its related tools.

Scala applications can already run on the Heroku platform via the Java support announced last week, but Heroku will soon support full out of the box support for Scala. What this means, according to Teich, is that users will be able to deploy Scala apps to Heroku with a single command, without having to jump through any additional hoops.

When Heroku Java support was announced, CTO Adam Wiggins told us “We didn’t want Heroku for each language, wanted one Heroku for everything, based on a strong stack of technology.” Teich says Heroku is working closely with Typesafe to make sure everything works the way Scala developers expect it to work.

Scala is a relatively new programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and designed for extreme scalability. It garnered attention in 2008 when Twitter began migrating some of its Ruby code to Scala, and other companies ranging from The Guardian to UBS have adopted the language. Typesafe was founded earlier this year.

Teich says the partnership came about because one of Heroku’s developers was passionate about Scala and wanted to see Heroku support it. Heroku’s executives encouraged him to contact Typesafe and the project ended up getting rolling.

Scala will be the fifth language supported by Heroku. Heroku already supports both Java and Clojure (a Lisp-like programming language that runs on the JVM), so Scala support is a logical next step. Teich emphasizes that the company is not going to stop at five languages.

Services Angle

Scala is one of many new (and not so new) programming languages and frameworks that are enabling greater scalability of applications, along with Clojure, Erlang and Node.js. These languages, as well as dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, have expanded enterprise development beyond Java and .Net. VMware’s Heroku competitor Cloud Foundry also supports Scala. Out of the box PaaS support from Heroku and Cloud Foundry will make it easier to experiment with and deploy Scala apps, making it more viable to use as an enterprise development stack.