This is the home of the Daffodil open source implementation of the Data Format Description Language (DFDL) specification, created by the Open Grid Forum.
There is information here for DFDL Users, as well as for Daffodil Developers.
A program that reads a DFDL Schema, and parses data as described by that schema to create an XML document.
In the future there will be a symmetric data serializer (or unparser as we like to call it.)
There are really two different kinds of developers. Those that want to embed Daffodil into an application, and those who want to contribute to Daffodil itself. These are not mutually exclusive.
If you want to embed Daffodil into some other system so that you can parse data using DFDL schemas to describe the format, then you can develop in Java or in Scala. There are APIs for both.
If you want to help in the development of Daffodil itself, then you will need to know or learn Scala, because that's what it is written in.