Actors in Java: Akka & Jetlang

[Fabrizio Giudici]

Dear all,

I'm making an evaluation for picking an actor platform that I could
possibly use later this year. So I've started doing some experimentation.
My desire was to end with a single platform, Akka, for it appears to be
the most performing one. I have two possible scenarios: the former is to
use actors as an evolution of message-passing architectures I'm already
using inside simple applications, where the choice is oriented to
simplifying concurrency code rather than having big number of actors to
scale with; the latter, instead, is possibly a distributed scenario
(grid-oriented) where performance and scalability are important.

I hoped that Akka would fit both purposes, but so far it seems to fall
short for scenario #1: in fact, as far as I understand, it doesn't support
publish & subscribe which is my favourite pattern. Can you confirm? Is it
possible to achieve it by means of some extension or is it in the future
milestones?

So, for scenario #1, I'm evaluating Jetlang. It seems fine, I'd just to
know whether some of you have some experience with it.

thanks.

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
fabrizio...@tidalwave.it
http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it

[Kevin Wright]

What version of Akka are you evaluating, and what's your time to market?

If it's far enough away, your best bet is to look at the M2 release of Akka 2.0.  In particular, the Event Bus:

http://akka.io/docs/akka/2.0-M2/java/event-bus.html

I wish I could tell you a final release date, but we're at milestones already and I know the guys are working flat out in the thing.  I'd also be very surprised if it wasn't done and dusted by April at the absolute latest; in time for ScalaDays 2012.

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[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:47:12 +0100, Kevin Wright
<kev.lee...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What version of Akka are you evaluating, and what's your time to market?
>
> If it's far enough away, your best bet is to look at the M2 release of
> Akka
> 2.0. In particular, the Event Bus:
>
> http://akka.io/docs/akka/2.0-M2/java/event-bus.html
>
> I wish I could tell you a final release date, but we're at milestones
> already and I know the guys are working flat out in the thing. I'd also
> be
> very surprised if it wasn't done and dusted by April at the absolute
> latest; in time for ScalaDays 2012.

This looks great, I didn't spot that page. It's very similar to the
interface of the stuff I've internally developed (a very rough stuff) and
I'd like to get rid of.

For the timing, it could be ok. I don't have a strict deadline, actors is
part of the stuff I'd like to push to my customers this year, and I don't
know whether they will accept it or not. So the thing is "sooner is
better"... is there some alpha/beta code that can be tried now?

[Kevin Wright]

Sure, the "Getting Started (java)" page in the documentation details all the maveney goodness you could ever want:

http://akka.io/docs/akka/2.0-M2/intro/getting-started-first-java.html#getting-started-first-java

And the overall content page for the M2 documentation:

http://akka.io/docs/akka/2.0-M2/

It's also worth signing up to the user group, then you can easily report any bugs that crop up whilst you're kicking the types (it *is* a milestone, after all).  The focus is mostly Scala-centric, but folk will happy field questions about the Java API as well:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/akka-user

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2012-01-03 at 12:37 +0100, Fabrizio Giudici wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I'm making an evaluation for picking an actor platform that I could
> possibly use later this year. So I've started doing some experimentation.
> My desire was to end with a single platform, Akka, for it appears to be
> the most performing one. I have two possible scenarios: the former is to
> use actors as an evolution of message-passing architectures I'm already
> using inside simple applications, where the choice is oriented to
> simplifying concurrency code rather than having big number of actors to
> scale with; the latter, instead, is possibly a distributed scenario
> (grid-oriented) where performance and scalability are important.

Is the choice of Akka decided or is there a possibility of a framework
such as GPars (http://gpars.codehaus.org/) getting a look in?

> I hoped that Akka would fit both purposes, but so far it seems to fall
> short for scenario #1: in fact, as far as I understand, it doesn't support
> publish & subscribe which is my favourite pattern. Can you confirm? Is it
> possible to achieve it by means of some extension or is it in the future
> milestones?

Hummm... GPars might fall at hurdle #2 as the remote / cluster stuff
isn't as well shaken down.

> So, for scenario #1, I'm evaluating Jetlang. It seems fine, I'd just to
> know whether some of you have some experience with it.
>
> thanks.
>
> --
> Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
> Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
> fabrizio...@tidalwave.it
> http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it
>

--
Russel.
=============================================================================
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41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@russel.org.uk
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[rus...@russel.org.uk]

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[Kirk Pepperdine]

+1 on using and waiting if you can. I benched the current build with some of the Akka guys and whie performance was stellar, they were concerned about a few things. The benching confirmed some issues that they were looking at and we discussed solutions that should make it even better. And, Akka plays beautifully with Java as well.

Regards,

Kirk

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[Kirk Pepperdine]

what I was suggesting were internal changes that should not have any effect on the API…

Kirk

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[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:35:49 +0100, Kirk Pepperdine
<kirk.pe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> what I was suggesting were internal changes that should not have any
> effect on the API…

API stability is anyway not a problem for some months (I mean, unless
there's a rewrite from scratch).

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 3:37 AM, Fabrizio Giudici <Fabrizio...@tidalwave.it> wrote:

in fact, as far as I understand, it doesn't support publish & subscribe which is my favourite pattern.

Little known fact: Guava added an Event Bus not long ago.

-- 

Cédric

[Kevin Wright]

And a swanky @Beta annotation too, it would seem.  I must steal that one for my own nefarious purposes.

All we need now is for them to release the Google Annotations Gallery into Maven... :)

2012/1/3 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>

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[Casper Bang]

+1. Thanks for the pointer.