Akka in Action

Summary

Akka in Action is a comprehensive tutorial on building message-oriented systems using Akka. The book takes a hands-on approach, where each new concept is followed by an example that shows you how it works, how to implement the code, and how to (unit) test it.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

Akka makes it relatively easy to build applications in the cloud or on devices with many cores that efficiently use the full capacity of the computing power available. It's a toolkit that provides an actor programming model, a runtime, and required support tools for building scalable applications.

About the Book

Akka in Action shows you how to build message-oriented systems with Akka. This comprehensive, hands-on tutorial introduces each concept with a working example. You'll start with the big picture of how Akka works, and then quickly build and deploy a fully functional REST service out of actors. You'll explore test-driven development and deploying and scaling fault-tolerant systems. After mastering the basics, you'll discover how to model immutable messages, implement domain models, and apply techniques like event sourcing and CQRS. You'l also find a tutorial on building streaming applications using akka-stream and akka-http. Finally, you'l get practical advice on how to customize and extend your Akka system.

What's Inside

• Getting concurrency right
• Testing and performance tuning
• Clustered and cloud-based applications
• Covers Akka version 2.4

About the Reader

This book assumes that you're comfortable with Java and Scala. No prior experience with Akka required.

About the Authors

A software craftsman and architect, Raymond Roestenburg is an Akka committer. Rob Bakker specializes in concurrent back-end systems and systems integration. Rob Williams has more than 20 years of product development experience.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing Akka
2. Up and running
3. Test-driven development with actors
4. Fault tolerance
5. Futures
6. Your first distributed Akka app
7. Configuration, logging, and deployment
8. Structural patterns for actors
9. Routing messages
10. Message channels
11. Finite-state machines and agents
12. System integration
13. Streaming
14. Clustering
15. Actor persistence
16. Performance tips
17. Looking ahead

Raymond Roestenburg is an experienced software craftsman, polyglot programmer, and software architect. He is an active member of the Scala community, an Akka committer, and contributed to the Akka-Camel module.

Rob Bakker is an experienced developer focused on concurrent back-end systems and system integration. He has used Scala and Akka in production from version 0.7.

Rob Williams is founder of ontometrics, a practice that has been focused on Java solutions that include machine learning. He first used Actor-based programming a decade ago, and found Akka while looking for someone who had given thought to the idea of supervision, and has used it for several projects since.