Posted by Arjan Blokzijl just before lunchtime: October 22nd, 2009
Last week me and some of my colleagues had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of an excellent training given by Jonas Bonér. The topic was his new pet project: the Akka framework. Perhaps you’ve played around with Scala lately, and also have taken the first steps in using its Actor library. Simply stated, an Actor is a unit of execution that (usually asynchronously) processes messages and encapsulate their state. An actor does not expose its state, and messages are processed sequentially. The Actor model has been around for quite some time, but today the best-known Actor implementation is Erlang.
The Actor model has been implemented in the standard Scala library by Philipp Haller (for the interested reader, a solid reference is for instance this article explaining how actors in Scala work). In most Actor examples written in Scala, it is not uncommon to find only EchoActors, PingPongActors, and FibonacciSolvingActors. Nice examples, but perhaps you might wonder if they are of any use in enterprise Scala at all. Next to this, if you’re interested in concurrent, message passing processing models, STM’s, NoSQL data stores, and occasionally wonder what the future in enterprise computing might bring, than Akka might be just the framework you’re looking for. This blog is intended to provide a brief introduction into one feature of this framework: Akka’s supervisor Actors. It is mostly based on the knowledge extracted from Jonas during the training, and I hope to whet your appetite for it.
