Effective Akka

Patterns and Best Practices

Avoid common mistakes when building distributed, asynchronous, high-performance software with the Akka toolkit and runtime. With this concise guide, author Jamie Allen provides a collection of best practices based on several years of using the actor model. The book also includes examples of actor application types and two primary patterns of actor usage, the Extra Pattern and Cameo Pattern.

Allen, the Director of Consulting for Typesafe—creator of Akka and the Scala programming language—examines actors with a banking-service use case throughout the book, using examples shown in Akka and Scala. If you have any experience with Akka, this guide is essential.

• Delve into domain-driven and work-distribution actor applications
• Understand why it’s important to have actors do only one job
• Avoid thread blocking by allowing logic to be delegated to a Future
• Model interactions as simply as possible to avoid premature optimization
• Create well-defined interactions, and know exactly what failures can occur
• Learn why you should never treat actors as you would an ordinary class
• Keep track of what goes on in production by monitoring everything
• Tune Akka applications with the Typesafe Console