Scala Reactive Programming

Akka Actor – ActorRef

ActorRef acts as a proxy to the actual Actor instance or object. An Actor can interact with other Actors through this proxy only; they cannot communicate with them directly. It follows the Proxy Design Pattern:

The ActorSystem.actorOf() function is used to create Actors. It returns Actor's ActorRef only. It does not return the original Actor object. It is an immutable and serializable handle to an Actor.

Observe the following code snippet from https://github.com/akka/akka/blob/v2.5.9/akka-actor/src/main/scala/akka/actor/ActorRef.scala:

abstract class ActorRef extends Comparable[ActorRef] with Serializable { 
}