Programming Concurrency on the JVM

Blocking Transactions—Sensible Wait

A transaction may depend on a variable that’s expected to change, and the failure of the transaction may be temporary. As a response to that failure, we may return an error code and ask the transaction to retry after a delay. However, there’s no point repeating the request until another task has changed the dependent data. Akka gives us a simple facility, retry, which will roll back and block the transaction until one of the reference objects the transaction depends on changes or the configurable block timeout is exceeded. I like to call this a “sensible wait” because that sounds better than “blocking.” Let’s put blocking, I mean sensible wait, to use in an example in Java first and then in Scala.

Blocking ...