Book Image

Learn Scala Programming

By : Slava Schmidt
Book Image

Learn Scala Programming

By: Slava Schmidt

Overview of this book

The second version of Scala has undergone multiple changes to support features and library implementations. Scala 2.13, with its main focus on modularizing the standard library and simplifying collections, brings with it a host of updates. Learn Scala Programming addresses both technical and architectural changes to the redesigned standard library and collections, along with covering in-depth type systems and first-level support for functions. You will discover how to leverage implicits as a primary mechanism for building type classes and look at different ways to test Scala code. You will also learn about abstract building blocks used in functional programming, giving you sufficient understanding to pick and use any existing functional programming library out there. In the concluding chapters, you will explore reactive programming by covering the Akka framework and reactive streams. By the end of this book, you will have built microservices and learned to implement them with the Scala and Lagom framework.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Akka basics

We will start by adding an Akka dependency into the build.sbt file of an empty Scala SBT project:

libraryDependencies +=  "com.typesafe.akka" %% "akka-actor" % akkaVersion
The akkaVersion could be looked upon the Akka website. At the time of writing this book, it was 2.5.13, so we would prepend val akkaVersion = "2.5.13" to the preceding snippet.
The SBT can create a minimal Akka project for you via a giter8 template: sbt new https://github.com/akka/akka-quickstart-scala.g8.

Now, we can instantiate an ActorSystem, which is the place where Akka's actors live:

import akka.actor._
val bakery = ActorSystem("Bakery")

Avoid defining multiple actor systems in the same JVM or even on the same machine. An actor system is not very lightweight and is usually configured to closely reflect the hardware configuration it is running on...