Thursday
Jan062011
BankSimple Mini-Architecture - Using a Next Generation Toolchain
Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 9:58AM 
I know people are always interested in what others are using to build their systems. Alex Payne, CTO of the new startup BankSimple, gives us a quick hit on their toolchain choices in this Quora thread. BankSimple positions itself as a customer-focused alternative to online banking. You may remember Alex from the early days of Twitter. Alex was always helpful to me on Twitter's programmer support list, so I really wish them well. Alex is also a bit of an outside the box thinker, which is reflected in some of their choices:
- The JVM acts as a convergence platform for these languages:
- Scala - ideal for writing performance-sensitive components that need the safety and expressiveness of the language's advanced type system.
- Clojure - rapidly prototype in a more dynamic language while still offering the benefits of functional programming.
- JRuby - makes available a bunch of great libraries and frameworks for doing frontend web development, like Rails and Padrino.
- Frontend: MooTools on the JavaScript side.
- Data Storage: Experimenting with Postgres 9.0 and Riak.
- Platform: Amazon EC2
Your typical web startup isn't using Scala, Clojure, and JRuby. Should you? If you are looking for a push to try something a little different, this may be it. After all, using different languages for different purposes makes as much sense as using different databases for different purposes.
Related Articles
- Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large by Alex Payne
- Alex Payne interviewed at OSCON 2010.
- The Bucks Stop Here by Melissa Silmore
Reader Comments (2)
Wow that is a different technology stack for a startup, JRuby I could understand but Scala and Clojure seem very random choices.
It would be great to hear more about your startup and future scalability.
No link is working on their beta website, at least in IE. Hope the banking app will do better ;-)