Availability and performance are two words that often characterize the requirements found behind most commercial software. As the volume of processed information continues to grow together with the rise of social networks and added complexity of online services, web servers are now increasingly confronted with heavy loads and higher numbers of concurrent requests. In this chapter, we will explore different ways to deal with better performance and scalability by covering the following topics:
The Async library, a new way to simplify asynchronous code, including examples of web services composition
Akka, a toolkit and runtime that simplifies the building of concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications based on the actor paradigm