Book Image

Scala Reactive Programming

By : Rambabu Posa
Book Image

Scala Reactive Programming

By: Rambabu Posa

Overview of this book

Reactive programming is a scalable, fast way to build applications, and one that helps us write code that is concise, clear, and readable. It can be used for many purposes such as GUIs, robotics, music, and others, and is central to many concurrent systems. This book will be your guide to getting started with Reactive programming in Scala. You will begin with the fundamental concepts of Reactive programming and gradually move on to working with asynchronous data streams. You will then start building an application using Akka Actors and extend it using the Play framework. You will also learn about reactive stream specifications, event sourcing techniques, and different methods to integrate Akka Streams into the Play Framework. This book will also take you one step forward by showing you the advantages of the Lagom framework while working with reactive microservices. You will also learn to scale applications using multi-node clusters and test, secure, and deploy your microservices to the cloud. By the end of the book, you will have gained the knowledge to build robust and distributed systems with Scala and Akka.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Akka Actors

In this section, we will discuss what an Actor is, its components, and the Actor lifecycle in detail. We will also discuss the differences between ActorPath and ActorRef.

What is an Actor?

An Actor is the fundamental computation unit. As per Carl Hewitt's Actor Model, an Actor should perform one, and only one, responsibility. Actors are lightweight event-driven processes.

The Actor is the fundamental building block in the Actor Model as well as Akka-based applications. In simple words, we can say that an Actor is a computational unit of an entity. Like an OOP instance (object), it also has state and behavior.

Like OOP's Object, Actor = State + Behavior.

Like an OOP's object, an Actor's state...