Jonas Bonér (@jboner) and Ross McDonald presented "Akka: Simpler Scalability..." at the London Scala User Group event at Skillsmatter yesterday.  I knew Akka was that very competent actors framework for Scala, with a vague sense that if I ever needed to do some serious actor stuff, I should go to Akka.  But in my mind that was just stability and performance, and I hadn't realized quite how rich Akka was.  Remote actors, agents (send behavior to state, rather than messages to behaviour), STM, transactors (actors+STM), modules... yup, got all of that stuff in there.

There were a couple of things I was particularly interested in.  First was Ross' description of how Thatcham have moved to Scala and Akka for the services they supply.  There's a write up, but highlights include the stability they have, on just a couple of servers, and the minimal amounts of code they have.  

I loved the module to integrate with Camel, meaning you can do things like wait for a file to be dropped in a directory and have the contents appear as a message to your actor. Or listen for a POST to a URL, meaning the content is delivered to your actor as a message.  Or JMS queue, which turns into...? Yes, a message to your actor.  You get the idea.  Goodbye integration, hello getting stuff done.

Impressive, rich open source product, with commercial support if you need it.

Links:

• The video and slides are online.  
• Actors in Scala by Philipp Haller and Frank Sommers published by Artima.
• http://akkasource.org/

Last night I attended Maciej Matyjas "Scaling Web Apps with Akka" LSUG talk at Skillsmatter. The video and slides are online, and @kingsleydavies was live blogging the event, so I won't repeat the details here.

There were a couple of things I particularly liked: getting coverage of the various styles of actors available in Scala; and seeing a different development style. I won't be switching back to emacs any time soon, but I do now see the appeal of SBT.

Do go check out the talk: it goes from zero through actors and a
complete Lift web app talking to Akka actors.