Akka - an open source, event-driven middleware project

"Akka - an open source, event-driven middleware project"

"... It is designed to allow developers to write simpler, correct concurrent applications using Actors, STM (software transactional memory) and transactors."



"... I was a core technical contributor at Terracotta, working on JVM-level clustering technology and at BEA, as part of the JRockit JVM team. I’ve spent a lot of time building middleware systems for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), trying to solve the same things we are solving with Akka now."

"...About 5-6 years ago I got really interested in Erlang. Erlang is programming language, but it’s not just a language, it’s a completely different platform than the JVM. I got really excited about it. Later I was doing consulting in the high availability (HA) and scalability area and I found Erlang to be an excellent platform for that."

"Wong: If asked to describe Akka in one sentence, what would that sentence be?
Bonér: Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault tolerant event-driven applications on the JVM."

"... The next big milestone, apart from Akka 1.2 coming out in a couple weeks, is Akka 2.0. 2.0 will add many features to make it easier to write distributed, really scalable software. Akka already has some basic tools for that, but 2.0 will take it to the next level by adding things like: adaptive automatic load balancing and cluster rebalancing, replication both for fail over, partitioning, cluster wide deployment, explicit and implicit actor migration across machines and more.
What’s important to understand is all of this will be done solely through configuration, so you write the systems the same, whether you want to run it on a single machine or across 100 machines. You write things once without thinking about clustering or scalability but later you can feed it with a configuration defining the topology, which actors should be clustered etc. and the runtime will automatically scale your application out."