Book Image

Akka Cookbook

By : Vivek Mishra, Héctor Veiga Ortiz
Book Image

Akka Cookbook

By: Vivek Mishra, Héctor Veiga Ortiz

Overview of this book

Akka is an open source toolkit that simplifies the construction of distributed and concurrent applications on the JVM. This book will teach you how to develop reactive applications in Scala using the Akka framework. This book will show you how to build concurrent, scalable, and reactive applications in Akka. You will see how to create high performance applications, extend applications, build microservices with Lagom, and more. We will explore Akka's actor model and show you how to incorporate concurrency into your applications. The book puts a special emphasis on performance improvement and how to make an application available for users. We also make a special mention of message routing and construction. By the end of this book, you will be able to create a high-performing Scala application using the Akka framework.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Integrating streams with Akka actors


The stages of a stream are ultimately lines of code that are fused and run on actors. This is why it is natural that Akka Stream has full integration with Akka actors. At the time of writing, there are multiple ways of interacting with Actors. One possibility is to use the traits named ActorPublisher and ActorSubscriber. These traits create an actor source or sink; however, they do not honor the back-pressure mechanism, and there are plans to decommission them in Akka 2.5+. Therefore, it is not recommended that you use them. 

Instead of using ActorPublisher and ActorSubscriber, we will see Source.queue for our Source actor, Sink.actorRefWithAck for our Sink actor, and mapAsync plus ask for our Flow. 

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will see how to create a Source that can emit elements into a stream, how to create a flow that can ask an actor, and how to create a Sink that pulls elements from a stream.

How to do it...

For this recipe, perform the following...