Mastering Functional Programming

The Actor Model in Practice

In the previous chapter, we started to look at the actors model as one of their concurrency models available in Scala. In Chapter 9, Libraries for Pure Functional Programming, we saw how challenges of asynchronous and multithreaded programming can be solved using IO and the infrastructure it provides. However, this kind of technology is still not widely adopted. In practice, when working with multithreading, concurrency, and asynchrony in Scala, you will need to deal with more robust libraries in real-world situations.

In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

• Akka overview
• Defining, creating, and messaging actors
• Working with actor systems