Using Akka to spawn server/clients

[M Ahsan]

First off, I was wondering if it is a correct design decision to run a Netty websocket server inside an Akka actor. I want to be able to receive messages on the actor, and send them to the clients connected to the Netty WS server. Netty has its own thread pools and whatnot, so is it ok to spawn a Netty server inside an Akka actor, or is there a better way to approach this?

Second, my Akka application spawns several WebSocket clients to other services. When I get data from the service, I want to publish that data to various actors. The WebSocket client I use (async-http-client) uses a callback to respond to incoming messages. I'm doing something along these lines right now:

http://paste.click/s/GImeFh

Is this correct usage, or is there a better way to approach this as well?

My real concern here is what I can/can't do in an actor, because I feel like these are some common things developers would use in their apps. If anybody can clear these issues, that would be great. Thanks!

[Patrik Nordwall]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 8:59 AM, M Ahsan <ag...@jantox.com> wrote:

First off, I was wondering if it is a correct design decision to run a Netty websocket server inside an Akka actor. I want to be able to receive messages on the actor, and send them to the clients connected to the Netty WS server. Netty has its own thread pools and whatnot, so is it ok to spawn a Netty server inside an Akka actor, or is there a better way to approach this?

You can do that, no problem. Be careful to not use the actor's mutable state from callbacks running on other threads, though. Perhaps better to start the Netty server outside of the actor. You have to interact with the actor using messages anyway.

http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4.7/general/jmm.html#Actors_and_shared_mutable_state

You could look at Akka Http as an alternative: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4.7/scala/http/routing-dsl/websocket-support.html

 

Second, my Akka application spawns several WebSocket clients to other services. When I get data from the service, I want to publish that data to various actors. The WebSocket client I use (async-http-client) uses a callback to respond to incoming messages. I'm doing something along these lines right now:

http://paste.click/s/GImeFh

Is this correct usage, or is there a better way to approach this as well?

That is alright. Same comment here, be careful to not close over the actor's state.

Alternative: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4.7/scala/http/client-side/websocket-support.html

 

My real concern here is what I can/can't do in an actor, because I feel like these are some common things developers would use in their apps. If anybody can clear these issues, that would be great. Thanks!

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Patrik Nordwall
Akka Tech Lead
Lightbend -  Reactive apps on the JVM
Twitter: @patriknw