Reactive Application Development

Chapter 3. Understanding Akka

This chapter covers

• The actor model
• The actor system
• Akka as concurrent and asynchronous
• Share nothing, nonblocking design
• Akka supervision and Routers

Now that you have a good understanding of what a reactive application is and why you need it, it’s time to pick a toolkit for building such systems. Before you do, quickly review the traits of a reactive system to make sure that the tools you pick are up to the job.

The Reactive Manifesto (chapter 1) lays out four key traits that identify a reactive system:

• Responsive— The system responds in a timely manner if at all possible. Responsiveness is the cornerstone of usability and utility; more than that, it means that problems may be detected quickly and dealt ...