Scala: Guide for Data Science Professionals

Actor construction

Actor construction is a common source of difficulty for people new to Akka. Unlike (most) ordinary objects, you never instantiate actors explicitly. You would never write, for instance, val echo = new EchoActor. In fact, if you try this, Akka raises an exception.

Creating actors in Akka is a two-step process: you first create a Props object, which encapsulates the properties needed to construct an actor. The way to construct a Props object differs depending on whether the actor takes constructor arguments. If the constructor takes no arguments, we simply pass the actor class as a type parameter to Props:

val echoProps = Props[EchoActor]

If we have an actor whose constructor does take arguments, we must pass these as additional ...