Learning Akka

Build fault tolerant concurrent and distributed applications with Akka

About This Book

• Build networked applications that self-heal
• Scale out your applications to handle more traffic faster
• An easy-to-follow guide with a number of examples to ensure you get the best start with Akka

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for beginner to intermediate Java or Scala developers who want to build applications to serve the high-scale user demands in computing today. If you need your applications to handle the ever-growing user bases and datasets with high performance demands, then this book is for you. Learning Akka will let you do more for your users with less code and less complexity, by building and scaling your networked applications with ease.

What You Will Learn

• Use Akka to overcome the challenges of concurrent programming
• Resolve the issues faced in distributed computing with the help of Akka
• Scale applications to serve a high number of concurrent users
• Make your system fault-tolerant with self-healing applications
• Provide a timely response to users with easy concurrency
• Reduce hardware costs by building more efficient multi-user applications
• Maximise network efficiency by scaling it

In Detail

Software today has to work with more data, more users, more cores, and more servers than ever. Akka is a distributed computing toolkit that enables developers to build correct concurrent and distributed applications using Java and Scala with ease, applications that scale across servers and respond to failure by self-healing. As well as simplifying development, Akka enables multiple concurrency development patterns with particular support and architecture derived from Erlang's concept of actors (lightweight concurrent entities). Akka is written in Scala, which has become the programming language of choice for development on the Akka platform.
Learning Akka aims to be a comprehensive walkthrough of Akka. This book will take you on a journey through all the concepts of Akka that you need in order to get started with concurrent and distributed applications and even build your own.
Beginning with the concept of Actors, the book will take you through concurrency in Akka. Moving on to networked applications, this book will explain the common pitfalls in these difficult problem areas while teaching you how to use Akka to overcome these problems with ease.
The book is an easy to follow example-based guide that will strengthen your basic knowledge of Akka and aid you in applying the same to real-world scenarios.

Style and approach

An easy-to-follow, example-based guide that will take you through building several networked-applications that work together while you are learning concurrent and distributed computing concepts. Each topic is explained while showing you how to design with Akka and how it is used to overcome common problems in applications. By showing Akka in context to the problems, it will help you understand what the common problems are in distributed applications and how to overcome them.