Akka for Newbies

Routers

Creating multiple instances of an actor

In the last two posts we’ve looked at dispatchers, how they work, and how we can implement bulkheads with dispatchers to ensure that damage from one part of the app doesn’t adversely affect the other. In this post we’ll…

Bulkheading with Dispatchers

Adding fault tolerance to your Akka application

In the previous post I talked about what dispatchers and their types. I also mentioned that dispatchers can be used to add bulkheading to your application. In this post I’ll…

Communication Patterns

Different ways to pass messages

In the previous post we created a SupervisorActor which supervises our GreetingsActor. The SupervisorActor did two things — send Hello message over to GreetingsActor, and ask it the count of the messages it has…

Actor Lifecycle

From start to stop

In the previous post we saw the different ways in which actors can communicate with each other. In this post we’ll see the lifecycle of an actor.

previous post

Communication between Actors

Passing messages between actors

In the previous example we created a single actor and sent it a hello message. However, Akka allows us to create an actor hierarchy. This means we can have some actor supervising some other actor(s).

Introduction to Akka

A brief history of time

A long time ago (before I was born), software was written to be run on a single processor. The only way to increase performance was to make the processor faster. Moore’s law says that the processors will become faster and…

Hotswapping Behavior

Changing behavior at runtime

As mentioned in my previous posts, an actor encapsulates state and behavior. Akka allows you to change the behavior of the actor at runtime in response to messages.

Actor Supervision

Dealing with failures

In the previous post we looked at routers, their types, and how they can be added to your application via code. In this post we’ll look at supervision i.e. how can a supervisor handle the failures of its subordinates.