Akka in Action

Chapter 5. Futures

In this chapter

• Using futures
• Composing futures
• Recovering from errors inside futures
• Combining futures and actors

In this chapter we’ll introduce futures. In short, futures are extremely useful and simple tools for combining functions asynchronously. The Akka toolkit initially provided its own future implementation. At the same time, several other libraries also had a future type, like the Twitter Finagle and scalaz libraries. Having proven its usefulness, the scala.concurrent package was redesigned through the Scala Improvement Process (SIP-14) to include Future as a common foundation in the standard Scala library. The Future type has been included in the standard library since Scala 2.10.

Like actors, futures are ...