About the Authors

Vishal Layka is the chief technology officer of Star Protocol and has over a decade experience in JVM languages. Vishal is actively involved in machine learning, inferential statistics, and pattern recognition using R, Python, Mahout, and Spark. When he needs a break from technology, Vishal reads eclectically from calculus to star formation.

David Pollak has been writing commercial software since 1977. He wrote the award-winning Mesa spreadsheet, which in 1992 was the first real-time spreadsheet. Wall Street companies traded billions of dollars a day through Mesa. In 1996, David sold his company to CMP Media and became CTO of CMP Media’s NetGuide Live and was one of the first large-scale users of Java and WebLogic to power an Internet site. In 1998, David released Integer, the world’s first browser-accessible, multiuser spreadsheet. Since 2000, David has been consulting for companies that include Hewlett-Packard, Pretzel Logic/WebGain, BankServ, Twitter, and SAP. David has been using Scala since 2006 and is the lead developer of the Lift Web framework. David blogs Scala at http://scala-blogs.org and rants about things on his personal blog at http://blog.lostlake.org. But David can most often be found on the Lift user group, http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb/.