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

Reading and updating agents


Agents are used to provide shared access to storage locations. They provide independent, asynchronous change of individual locations. Agents are bound to a single storage location for their lifetime and only allow mutation of that location (to a new state) to occur as a result of an action. Actions are functions (with, optionally, additional arguments) that are asynchronously applied to an agent's state and whose return value becomes the Agent's new state.

While updates to Agents are asynchronous, the state of an Agent is always immediately available for reading by any thread using get or apply without any messages.

Getting ready

Before we go through this recipe, we will need to download the akka-agent dependency in our project. For this, we will need to add the following dependency to the project's build.sbt:

libraryDependencies += "com.typesafe.akka" % "akka-agent_2.11" % "2.4.4" 

Now, open the terminal in Linux or command prompt in Windows and go to the project...