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

Pipelining and parallelizing streams


As seen in the previous recipes, Akka Streams provides a set of high-level APIs to process streams using actors as the underlying technology. ActorMaterializer is responsible for making this happen. ActorMaterializer allocates the resources and instantiates the classes required to have to turn your defined stream into a RunnableGraph. By default, all the processing stages are combined and executed sequentially. Therefore, a stage is limited to run at most once at any given time. 

Having a sequential execution might be desired in some scenarios; however, other use cases could benefit from parallelizing some processing tasks. Akka Streams provides a method called async to indicate when a stage should run asynchronously and have its own internal actor. By default, all the stages not marked async will run in a single actor. Asynchronous stages have internal buffers to make the passing of messages more efficient. This is to reduce the overhead introduced by...