Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 12. Introduction to Akka

"Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have faith in people, that they're good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them."

- Steve Jobs

As developers, we are used to facing programming problems and solving them using abstractions, programming models, or some design patterns. These programming models tend to make ours and consumer's lives easier. This chapter is about learning one such programming model that solves more than one problem. We'll understand and work with Akka, which is based on Actor models. We can think of Akka libraries (well mostly) as an open source set of libraries that help you write concurrent, fault tolerant, and distributed applications. We'll talk about what you might expect from this toolkit. As we go through the chapter, we'll try understanding the actor model and how these actors work together, as well as how the actor mechanism is different from any other concurrency mechanism.

Going...