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

The pausable actor pattern


Another common pattern among all enterprise integration patterns is to have a pausable entity. In the case of Akka, we might want to do this in order to make sure that an actor has finished processing one message before receiving another. We can easily create another actor to accomplish this thanks to two features: become/unbecome and stash/unstash. Become/unbecome lets us change the behavior of an actor at runtime. Stash/unstash lets us save messages in an internal queue to later put them back into the mailbox. Then, this new actor will act as a proxy in front of your actor to deliver messages one by one only.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, we need to import the Hello-Akka project; all other prerequisites are the same as earlier.

How to do it…

For this recipe, we need to perform the following steps:

  1. To begin with, let's create the HardWorker actor. This actor wants to receive a new message only after finishing processing a previous one. It will randomly...