Missing akka-actors.jar?

[Adam Jabłoński]

Hi, I'm using Scala-SDK 3.0 with Scala-2.10.1 and I couldn't find akka-actors.jar in package explorer. 

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought it should be shipped with Scala since 2.10.0, and there is only scala-actors.jar. I've downloaded standalone Scala-2.10.1 and it contains this jar. Why it is missing in IDE?

[Mirco Dotta]

Hi Adam,

We have been thinking about it (we even have a ticket https://scala-ide-portfolio.assembla.com/spaces/scala-ide/tickets/1001211), 

but in the end we decided not to do it. There are two reasons, one is strictly technical, and I would define the other "practical".

* The technical reason is that it would make the Scala IDE build harder. The "issue" is that we build the Scala IDE development branch 

against the on development Scala 2.11.0(-SNAPSHOT), and there is no Akka actor artifact published against 2.11.0-SNAPSHOT. 

Hence, we would need to build the Akka dependency ourselves, and experience taught us that doing so is time consuming (at best).

* The practical reason is that  we are not convinced there is much benefit in having the Akka actor JAR bundled with the Scala IDE. In 

most of the cases, you'll have a build file where you list your dependencies, and tools such as sbteclipse can automatically update the 

project's classpath for you, which I feel makes pretty much useless having the Akka actor JAR bundled with the Scala IDE. Furthermore, 

Akka and Scala have different release cycles, hence it may be (very) possible that the Akka JAR in the distribution is no longer the latest 

released Akka, which I think is one more reason for not bundling Akka in the Scala IDE.

The only situation when it would make sense to have the Akka actor JAR bundled in the Scala IDE is the first time you are looking at Akka 

actors, and you want to experiment without needing to create a build file for your project. But if that's what you are doing, I believe the best 

way to get started is to use Activator (http://typesafe.com/platform/getstarted) and import the project in Eclipse. The downside is that you 

need to download one more tool - maybe in the future we'll integrate the template catalogue in the Scala IDE, so that you won't need to 

download Activator.

-- Mirco

On Jun 20, 2013, at 12:30 AM, Adam Jabłoński wrote:

Hi, I'm using Scala-SDK 3.0 with Scala-2.10.1 and I couldn't find akka-actors.jar in package explorer. 

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought it should be shipped with Scala since 2.10.0, and there is only scala-actors.jar. I've downloaded standalone Scala-2.10.1 and it contains this jar. Why it is missing in IDE?

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---------------

Mirco Dotta

PSE-D, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Twitter: @mircodotta

http://typesafe.com/

[Adam Jabłoński]

Hello Mirco,

Thanks for the answer, but I want to understand it clear.

Let me explain: I wrote scala class with Vim it's simple hello world using Akka, I can compile and run this with Scala 2.10 without declaring any dependencies (because Akka is part of Scala since 2.10), I can also use Akka in Scala REPL, but I cannot compile and run the same example in Scala IDE  with  Scala 2.10.1, it's a bit confusing.