Scala in Action

Chapter 9. Concurrency programming in Scala

This chapter covers

• Challenges with concurrent programming
• The actor programming model
• Handling faults in actors
• Composing concurrent programs with Future and Promise

In this chapter I introduce the most exciting feature of Scala: its actor library. Think of an actor as an object that processes a message (your request) and encapsulates state (state is not shared with other actors). The ability to perform an action in response to an incoming message is what makes an object an actor. At the high level, actors are the way you should do OOP. Remember that the actor model encourages no shared state architecture. In this chapter, I explain why that’s an important property to have for any concurrent ...