Effective Akka

Preface

Welcome to Effective Akka. In this book, I will provide you with comprehensive information about what I’ve learned using the Akka toolkit to solve problems for clients in multiple industries and use cases. This is a chronicle of patterns I’ve encountered, as well as best practices for developing applications with the Akka toolkit.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for developers who have progressed beyond the introductory stage of writing Akka applications and are looking to understand best practices for development that will help them avoid common missteps. Many of the tips are relevant outside of Akka as well, whether it is using another actor library, Erlang, or just plain asynchronous development. This book is not for developers who are new to Akka and are looking for introductory information.

What Problems Are We Solving with Akka?

The first question that has to be addressed is, what problems is Akka trying to solve for application developers? Primarily, Akka provides a programming model for building distributed, asynchronous, high-performance software. Let’s investigate each of these individually.

Distributed

Building applications that can scale outward, and by that I mean across multiple JVMs and physical machines, is very difficult. The most critical aspects a developer must keep in mind are resilience and replication: create multiple instances of similar classes for handling failure, but in a way that also performs within the boundaries of your application’s nonfunctional ...