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

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

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 Introducing Akka Up and running Test-driven development with actors Fault tolerance Futures Your first distributed Akka app Configuration, logging, and deployment Structural patterns for actors Routing messages Message channels Finite-state machines and agents System integration Streaming Clustering Actor persistence Performance tips Looking ahead

When it comes to big data processing, we can no longer ignore concurrency or try to add it in after the fact. Fortunately, the solution is not a new paradigm of development, but rather an old one. With this hands-on guide, Java and Scala developers will learn how to embrace concurrent and distributed applications with the open source Akka toolkit. You'll learn how to put the actor model and its associated patterns to immediate and practical use. Throughout the book, you'll deal with an analogous workforce problem: how to schedule a group of people across a variety of projects while optimizing their time and skillsets. This example will help you understand how Akka uses actors, streams, and other tools to stitch your application together. Model software that reflects the real world with domain-driven design Learn principles and practices for implementing individual actors Unlock the real potential of Akka with patterns for combining multiple actors Understand the consistency tradeoffs in a distributed system Use several Akka methods for isolating and dealing with failures Explore ways to build systems that support availability and scalability Tune your Akka application for performance with JVM tools and dispatchers

Learn how to integrate full-stack open source big data architecture and to choose the correct technology—Scala/Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra, and Kafka—in every layer. Big data architecture is becoming a requirement for many different enterprises. So far, however, the focus has largely been on collecting, aggregating, and crunching large data sets in a timely manner. In many cases now, organizations need more than one paradigm to perform efficient analyses. Big Data SMACK explains each of the full-stack technologies and, more importantly, how to best integrate them. It provides detailed coverage of the practical benefits of these technologies and incorporates real-world examples in every situation. This book focuses on the problems and scenarios solved by the architecture, as well as the solutions provided by every technology. It covers the six main concepts of big data architecture and how integrate, replace, and reinforce every layer: The language: Scala The engine: Spark (SQL, MLib, Streaming, GraphX) The container: Mesos, Docker The view: Akka The storage: Cassandra The message broker: Kafka What You Will Learn: Make big data architecture without using complex Greek letter architectures Build a cheap but effective cluster infrastructure Make queries, reports, and graphs that business demands Manage and exploit unstructured and No-SQL data sources Use tools to monitor the performance of your architecture Integrate all technologies and decide which ones replace and which ones reinforce Who This Book Is For: Developers, data architects, and data scientists looking to integrate the most successful big data open stack architecture and to choose the correct technology in every layer

Master the art of creating scalable, concurrent, and reactive applications using Akka About This Book This book will help you cure anemic models with domain-driven design We cover major Akka programming concepts such as concurrency, scalability, and reactivity You will learn concepts like Event Sourcing and CQRS via Akka Persistence, Akka Streams, Akka Http as well as Akka Clustering Who This Book Is For If you want to use the Lightbend platform to create highly performant reactive applications, then this book is for you. If you are a Scala developer looking for techniques to use all features of the new Akka release and want to incorporate these solutions in your current or new projects, then this book is for you. Expert Java developers who want to build scalable, concurrent, and reactive application will find this book helpful. What You Will Learn Use Akka actors to enable parallel execution Build out domain-driven design based components like entities and aggregates Respond to command requests on that aggregate root that affect the internal state Leverage Akka Persistence, protobuf and Cassandra to save the persistent state of you entities Build out complex processing graphs with the Graph Builder DSL Understand the dynamic push/pull nature of backpressure handling within Akka Streams Route HTTP requests to an actor and return a response Deploy actor instances across a set of nodes via ConductR for high availability In Detail For a programmer, writing multi-threaded applications is critical as it is important to break large tasks into smaller ones and run them simultaneously. Akka is a distributed computing toolkit that uses the abstraction of the Actor model, enabling developers to build correct, concurrent, and distributed applications using Java and Scala with ease. The book begins with a quick introduction that simplifies concurrent programming with actors. We then proceed to master all aspects of domain-driven design. We'll teach you how to scale out with Akka Remoting/Clustering. Finally, we introduce Conductr as a means to deploy to and manage microservices across a cluster. Style and approach This comprehensive, fast-paced guide is packed with several real-world use cases that will help you understand concepts, issues, and resolutions while using Akka to create highly performant, scalable, and concurrency-proof reactive applications.

USE THE ACTOR MODEL TO BUILD SIMPLER SYSTEMS WITH BETTER PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY Enterprise software development has been much more difficult and failure-prone than it needs to be. Now, veteran software engineer and author Vaughn Vernon offers an easier and more rewarding method to succeeding with Actor model. Reactive Messaging Patterns with the Actor Model shows how the reactive enterprise approach, Actor model, Scala, and Akka can help you overcome previous limits of performance and scalability, and skillfully address even the most challenging non-functional requirements. Reflecting his own cutting-edge work, Vernon shows architects and developers how to translate the longtime promises of Actor model into practical reality. First, he introduces the tenets of reactive software, and shows how the message-driven Actor model addresses all of them–making it possible to build systems that are more responsive, resilient, and elastic. Next, he presents a practical Scala bootstrap tutorial, a thorough introduction to Akka and Akka Cluster, and a full chapter on maximizing performance and scalability with Scala and Akka. Building on this foundation, you’ll learn to apply enterprise application and integration patterns to establish message channels and endpoints; efficiently construct, route, and transform messages; and build robust systems that are simpler and far more successful. Coverage Includes How reactive architecture replaces complexity with simplicity throughout the core, middle, and edges The characteristics of actors and actor systems, and how Akka makes them more powerful Building systems that perform at scale on one or many computing nodes Establishing channel mechanisms, and choosing appropriate channels for each application and integration challenge Constructing messages to clearly convey a sender’s intent in communicating with a receiver Implementing a Process Manager for your Domain-Driven Designs Decoupling a message’s source and destination, and integrating appropriate business logic into its router Understanding the transformations a message may experience in applications and integrations Implementing persistent actors using Event Sourcing and reactive views using CQRS Find unique online training on Domain-Driven Design, Scala, Akka, and other software craftsmanship topics using the for{comprehension} website at forcomprehension.com.