AKKA

Akka is a really cool toolkit for building highly concurrent and distributed applications based on a message-driven model. Let’s review some key concepts in order to understand it.

Actor Model

AKKA is based on an actor model that is quite simple, let’s suppose that we have 2 actors: A and B

Actor A: Hi Actor B, can you do xyz

Actor B: Sure, give me a while

Basically a model based on messaging where one Actor send a message to other one when needs something.

Main Concepts Related to AKKA

In order to understand how AKKA works, it’s vital understand a couple of concepts:

Concurrency and Parallelism

Concurrency

Many task running on single core machine. One coffee machine, many guys taking a little bit of coffee one after other

Parallelism

Many task running on multicore processor machine. Many coffee machines, many guys taking coffee from there at the same time

Sync and Async processes

Sync

One task invokes another one and it should wait until the other one has completed to continue

Async

One task invokes another one and it can keep working with no need to wait for the completion. After the completion, the invoked task can inform about its progress with a callback, message or any other way

Blocking and Non-blocking

Blocking

One task will delay other tasks running

Non-Blocking

One task run and it wont delay other tasks running

Race Condition

It’s when more than one actor are trying to modify the state of something at the same time

That’s all for now, in the next posts we are going to dive into the AKKA world