In this chapter, we learned what actors are and how to use them to build concurrent programs. Using the Akka actor framework, we studied how to create actors, organize them into hierarchies, manage their lifecycle, and recover them from errors. We examined important patterns in actor communication and learned how to model actor behavior. Finally, we saw how the actor model can ensure location transparency, and serve as a powerful tool to seamlessly build distributed systems.
Still, there are many Akka features that we omitted in this chapter. Akka comes with detailed online documentation, which is one of the best sources of information on Akka. To obtain an in-depth understanding of distributed programming, we recommend the books Distributed Algorithms, Nancy A. Lynch, published by Elsevier and Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming, Christian Cachin, Rachid Guerraoui, Luis Rodrigues, published by Springer.
In the following chapter, we will summarize the different...