Getting started with Akka
Akka is a toolkit to simplify writing concurrent and distributed applications, tasks that can be complex to achieve, as we described at the beginning of this chapter. As Akka is largely documented both by a number of books as well as extensive online documentation, our goal here is mostly to experiment with the technology. We will see how to elegantly write Scala code to solve problems that might otherwise be error-prone and hard to understand if written in more conventional ways such as thread synchronization and other languages such as Java. Akka is written in Scala, but provides to both Java and Scala APIs.
Understanding the Actor model
Akka relies on the Actor paradigm to create concurrent applications. The Actor model has already been introduced decades ago in the original paper of Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger entitled A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence, 1973, IJCAI. Erlang is an example of language that has been...
