Programming Concurrency on the JVM

Remote Actors

In the actor examples we have written so far, the actors and their clients were all within a single JVM process. One camp of developers believes actors should really be used for interprocess communication, like in Erlang. The other camp of developers uses actors for intraprocess communication like we saw. Scala and Akka cater to both camps.

Using remote actors in Akka is much like using in-process actors; the only difference is in how we get access to the actors. Under the covers, Akka uses JBoss Netty and Google Protocol Buffers libraries to make the remoting happen seamlessly. We can pass any serializable message and references to any actor to the remote actors across process boundaries. Akka provides both programmatic and configuration ...