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

Scheduling periodic messages to an actor


Scheduling messages is another common task in Akka. Akka brings a built-in scheduler that lets you schedule messages to be sent to actors either once or periodically. While the name of the component is "scheduler", the actual implementation performs delayed delivery of messages to actors. That is why some people argue that it probably should have been called "deferrer" or "delayer". Moreover, it only allows you to schedule messages to be delivered from the moment you call the method. This lets you schedule things to happen within a given duration or every so often. However, it does not allow you to schedule things in a more standard way, for example, sending this message to this actor every day at midnight.

That is why we are also going to see an open source project that integrates the quartz scheduler into Akka. This extension brings all the functionality of a true scheduler such as Quartz into the actor world.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe...