Avoid common mistakes when building distributed, asynchronous, high-performance software with the Akka toolkit and runtime. With this concise guide, author Jamie Allen provides a collection of best practices based on several years of using the actor model. The book also includes examples of actor application types and two primary patterns of actor usage, the Extra Pattern and Cameo Pattern.

Allen, the Director of Consulting for Typesafe—creator of Akka and the Scala programming language—examines actors with a banking-service use case throughout the book, using examples shown in Akka and Scala. If you have any experience with Akka, this guide is essential.

Delve into domain-driven and work-distribution actor applications

Understand why it’s important to have actors do only one job

Avoid thread blocking by allowing logic to be delegated to a Future

Model interactions as simply as possible to avoid premature optimization

Create well-defined interactions, and know exactly what failures can occur

Learn why you should never treat actors as you would an ordinary class

Keep track of what goes on in production by monitoring everything

Tune Akka applications with the Typesafe Console

Jamie Allen

Jamie Allen is the Director of Consulting for Typesafe, the company that makes the Scala programming language, the Akka toolkit and Play Framework. Jamie has been building actor-based systems with Scala since 2009. Jamie lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Yeon, and three children.