Question

I’m building a reverse proxy from scratch. The requirements are:

1) Super scalable. It must handle a lot of concurrent requests (also streaming, 1000 request/second would be a good performance in my case)
2) Super fast (non blocking).
3) No C/C++ or Erlang
4) Easy to mantain – even if it was, Assembly is not an option 🙂

After some research, most of people suggests using node.js or Scala – what do you think is the best solution for this kind of job? Which technologies would you use to build this kind of proxy?

Thanks

Answer 1

Personally I’d try out the Scala Finagle library first.

Just to expound a bit, people who said "try Node.js or Scala" are slightly misguided in that Scala—like Java—is just a programming language, whereas Node.js is most of a platform. Apart from its general advantages, the main things Scala brings to the table for this kind of project are:

1. A juicy bit of syntax that makes it easier to write actor systems as libraries, namely PartialFunction "literals":

   trait NeedsAPF {
     def pf: PartialFunction[Any,Unit]
   }

   object PFHaver extends NeedsAPF {
     def pf = {
       case i: Int => println("I got an int and it was " + i)
     }
   }

2. When you’re ready for it, a continuations plugin, which lets you write code that looks synchronous, but can be asynchronous under the covers.