Reactive Application Development

Chapter 2. Getting started with Akka

This chapter covers

• Building an actor system
• Distributing and scaling horizontally
• Applying reactive principles

You understand from chapter 1 the tenets of reactive design, but haven’t yet seen them in practice. This chapter changes that situation. In this chapter, you build a simple reactive system by using the actor model that was introduced in chapter 1. The actor model is one of the most common reactive patterns. Actors can send and receive messages, make local decisions, create new actors, and do all that asynchronously and without locks. You build the example in this chapter with the Akka toolkit, which you also saw previously. Akka is a powerful system for creating and running actors. It’s written ...