Reactive Web Applications

Chapter 6. Actors

This chapter covers

• Creating actors and actor hierarchies
• Sending messages and handling failure the Akka way
• Reacting to load with control messages and circuit breakers

The actor-based concurrency model^[1] was popularized by the Erlang programming language and is implemented on the JVM by the Akka concurrency toolkit (http://akka.io). This chapter provides an introduction to the wonderful world of actors. As you’ll see, actors are a very effective tool for building scalable and resilient applications. As Akka is available out of the box in Play, we can use it to implement more-advanced asynchronous logic.

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Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger, “A universal modular ACTOR formalism for artificial intelligence,” ...