Concurrent Application Development using Akka with Scala

Building scalable, concurrent systems is hard. Think parallelism and we think about threads. Using threads for parallelism is not only difficult but also not scalable. You can only create a certain number of threads on a box. On the other hand you can create a million Akka actors on a box. Also it is difficult to scale out (parallel scaling) using threads. Any multi threaded application likely has the keyword synchronized peppered throughout the code base. It does not follow any pattern which makes the code base and application difficult to manage and it also indicates the difficulty in managing threads.

The Akka framework has brought Actors to the Java virtual machine. Actors way of doing parallelism is way simpler than multi-threaded applications. Scala is a modern programming language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that combines the best features of object-oriented and functional programming languages. Using Scala one can write concise programs with the power of concurrency. Since Scala runs on the JVM, it can access any Java library and is interoperable with Java frameworks. This book is a practical guide to use Akka along with power of Scala to design business solutions for scalability, fault tolerant concurrent systems. It introduces the topics of concurrency, Scala and Akka which are then blended together to provide a solution on steroids for modern day web scale applications.