Wikipedia presence

[Nicholas Sterling]

After reading about Akka's dataflow concurrency, I looked it up on Wikipedia.  I noticed that there were links at the bottom to various dataflow libraries, e.g. for Ruby, so I added a link for Akka:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow#External_links

But to my surprise, there is no entry for Akka itself to link to.  Nor is there an entry for Typesafe.  A reference to Akka in the "Actor Model" points to akka.io rather than a Wikipedia entry.

Are you deliberately keeping a low profile on Wikipedia, or is this just #3000 on the priority list? Do you want someone (could be me) to add starter entries for the two?  If so, it would help if you could point us at some historical info (founders, key contributors and dates, etc.).

Nicholas

[Roland Kuhn]

Hi Nicholas,

Your second guess is the correct one, it is somewhere around #1277 ;-) I heard Jonas mumble something about writing up the historical parts (or was that on twitter?), I’ll let him answer that part when he’s back from vacation. It would indeed be very welcome if you could start such an entry, though I’d think that we might want to collaborate before publishing it on wikipedia. How about starting out as a gist?

Thanks,

Dr. Roland Kuhn
Akka Tech Lead
Typesafe – The software stack for applications that scale.
twitter: @rolandkuhn

[Paulo "JCranky" Siqueira]

Talking about presence in the "world out there", how about an interview in the FLOSS Weekly podcast?

This could be interesting for play and scala itself as well. They just ask that the framework / technology creators get in touch.

[]s,

Paulo "JCranky" Siqueira
http://jcranky.com
http://lojinha.paulosiqueira.com.br

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[Roland Kuhn]

Hi Paulo,

thanks for pointing it out, I have bookmarked your mail for after the vacation.

Regards,

Roland

[Nicholas Sterling]

OK, I took a stab at a rough draft of something basic.  I'm not attached to it at all, so feel free to flesh it out further or scrap it:

https://gist.github.com/raw/4401970/ddcde73d9a1065f7311522561a611b1a64d65707/gistfile1.txt

https://gist.github.com/4401970

Let me know what you want to do.

Nicholas

p.s.  I didn't mention this in the notes, but you could attach the Akka logo in the upper right.  In order to do that I think you have to submit the image to Wikimedia Commons, but there are legal implications to doing so, so you'd have to do that yourselves.  See the IBM page and click on the logo to see its "Permission" info.

[Ricky Clarkson]

That looks really good to me.  I'd add mentions of other actor libraries (maybe wikipedia already has a category Akka could be part of for this).

[Nicholas Sterling]

Ah, I hadn't thought of that -- thanks.

OK, let's see -- this page will have a link to the "Actor model" page, which has a table of actor libraries and frameworks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model#Actor_libraries_and_frameworks

There are seven JVM actor libraries on this list, including Akka.  Lift actors are not in there, and perhaps there are others missing as well.  Still, do you think that this suffices?  My preference would be to not duplicate the effort.

BTW, that table said that the last Akka release was in June, so I just updated it to 12/22 for the 2.1.0 release.

Oh, and we should probably mention licensing.

Nicholas

On 12/28/2012 04:38 PM, Ricky Clarkson wrote:

[Nicholas Sterling]

I discovered a few things about Wikipedia (while I have edited many pages, this is the first time I've created one):

• They have a staging area for preparing/discussing new pages.
• They don't want a person/company/project to write its own page -- it's considered a conflict of interest.
• If you don't have references for what's in a page, it might get deleted.

Sooooo, I went ahead and created a draft page on Wikipedia for Akka:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Akka_(toolkit)

I might have to change that name to get the disambiguation right, though.

So I need three things:

• blanks filled in
• more general feedback
  
• references I can cite

Help?

Nicholas

[Roland Kuhn]

Hi Nicholas,

first, thanks a lot for your effort! Unfortunately I’ll have to chunk up working on this (due to vacation), find below the first batch.

Maybe it would be good to have a version history in table form:

0.5 – Jul 13, 2009

0.6 – Jan 5, 2010

0.7 – Mar 22, 2010

0.8 – Apr 1, 2010

0.8.1 – Apr 6, 2010

0.9 – Jun 1, 2010

0.9.1 – Jun 7, 2010

0.10 – Aug 21, 2010

1.0 – Feb 16, 2011

1.1 – May 12, 2011

1.1.1 – May 24, 2011

1.1.2 – May 25, 2011

1.1.3 – Jun 29, 2011

1.2 – Sep 19, 2011

1.3 – Jan 27, 2012

1.3.1 – Feb 7, 2012

2.0 – Mar 6, 2012

2.0.1 – Apr 13, 2012

2.0.2 – Jun 4, 2012

2.0.3 – Aug 15, 2012

2.0.4 – Nov 14, 2012

2.1.0 – Dec 22, 2012

Not sure whether everything before 1.0 should be listed, but it doesn’t hurt to show that it was released in 2009.

I’m not sure when Viktor became Tech Lead, but our recent promotions happened in Nov 2012.

• more general feedback
  

I’d remove the comparison to the old Scala actors (since they are deprecated now; could come back as part of Jonas’ motivation for creating Akka) and de-emphasize durable mailboxes (I’d put that closer to Camel support in weight). The key points distinguishing Akka are

– purely message-based and asynchronous, share-nothing

– mandatory parental supervision for fault-tolerant actor hierarchies

– orthogonal error handling (sender != supervisor)

– scale up and out by configuration (dispatchers/threadpools as well as Routers and remoting) at deployment time

– altogether the focus is on scalability across multiple cores and multiple network nodes

Then there are several modules (difficult to order; perhaps alphabetical?):

– FSM

– dataflow

– remoting / clustering

– camel

– slf4j

– STM (transactor & agent)

– durable mailboxes

– ømq

– SBT plugin

Concerning the ecosystem I’d say that spray and Play! are built on top of Akka and of course many more which I cannot currently research (there was this list of github projects compiled by Samira Tasharofi).

• references I can cite

The Akka roadmap (https://docs.google.com/document/d/18W9-fKs55wiFNjXL9q50PYOnR7-nnsImzJqHOPPbM4E/edit) would be good to link to, e.g. as background for the “current emphasis” sentence.

Maybe check if http://www.jinspired.com/site/performance-instrumentation-monitoring-of-an-efficient-runtime-akka-part-2 would be worth citing as external performance measurement, though it focuses on latency and not throughput/scalability which is not exactly our core concern (although we are not doing bad at all :-) ).

Help?

Hope this helps for the time being, gotta run.

Thanks again,

Roland

Nicholas

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[Jonas Bonér]

I edited it some, please continue helping shaping it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Articles_for_creation/Akka_(toolkit)

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[Rich Dougherty]

Since it's an encyclopaedia maybe it should also mention the actor model and the first Scala actor implementation written by Philip Haller. Maybe also cut down a bit on the full list of features (just my opinion).

I can make those changes if that sounds OK.

[Jonas Bonér]

Sounds good. Thanks.

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CTO Typesafe - The software stack for applications that scale

Phone: +46 733 777 123

Twitter: @jboner

[Nicholas Sterling]

It's great to see the page growing some meat on its bones.

I rewrote the list of distinguishing features to be less jargony and much more descriptive. I also added a link to the actor model. I hope that's OK -- you guys are the experts, but I think perhaps I want to help bring the page into line with the Wikipedia folks' expectations.

I think before listing the modules, we need to say a few words about what modules are. Feel free to add that; I'll massage it if I think it needs it.

Nicholas

[Nicholas Sterling]

Not pushing, but any more thoughts on this?  Any additional content you'd like to get in there?  Happy with the way it's looking?

The WP folks are probably going to bark about the fact that no references are cited for any of the data in there, but if there are no good references, I'll ask them what we should do.

[Roland Kuhn]

Hi Nicholas,

14 jan 2013 kl. 21:53 skrev Nicholas Sterling:

Not pushing, but any more thoughts on this?  Any additional content you'd like to get in there?  Happy with the way it's looking?

Jonas, how about adding some references to Scala OTP to the historic background story? I don’t know those details, though.

The WP folks are probably going to bark about the fact that no references are cited for any of the data in there, but if there are no good references, I'll ask them what we should do.

Hmm, I don’t have experience with this; with “data” you mean the historic data? What is typically used for that? Other references are indeed hard to come by, academic papers don’t help too much since what is not covered on the linked WP pages was developed by us. Should we link to the DynamoDB paper and something for Riak? That might help.

Regards,

[Evan Chan]

Didn't Martin Odersky pen multiple papers on the Actor model?

Also, the Phi accrual failure detector and Dynamo papers seem very relevant for Akka Cluster.

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[Roland Kuhn]

14 jan 2013 kl. 22:14 skrev Evan Chan:

Didn't Martin Odersky pen multiple papers on the Actor model?

Also, the Phi accrual failure detector and Dynamo papers seem very relevant for Akka Cluster.

Yes, Dynamo I just mentioned, but the failure detector should also be cited, thanks!

Regards,

Roland

[√iktor Ҡlang]

I think it would be nice to invert the sort of the version numbers, and include feature highlights for each (major) version.

I also suggest to split the text into a "Vision" section and then a section on core values and design/technology choices to align with the vision.

Also referring to eventual consistency, vector clocks, Gul Aghas and Carl Hewitts papers. Discussing message delivery guarantees, distributed by design etc.

Cheers,

√

Viktor Klang
Director of Engineering

Typesafe - The software stack for applications that scale
Twitter: @viktorklang

[√iktor Ҡlang]

I'd also leave out the different modules and settle for describing akka as being modular

[Nicholas Sterling]

On 01/14/2013 03:32 PM, √iktor Ҡlang wrote:
> I'd also leave out the different modules and settle for describing akka as being modular
>

Perhaps what we could do is describe it as being modular and give a couple of examples, without embedding a list which would require maintenance.

By "references" I mean information sources which could be used to verify key historical facts mentioned in the article. For the description of Akka, the Akka web site should suffice. Could we provide a link to an early presentation by Jonas introducing Akka, and another to an announcement about the creation of Typesafe from the Scala and Akka folks? Any others along those lines?

Nicholas

[√iktor Ҡlang]

Here's the typesafe press release archive: http://typesafe.com/company/press

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[Nicholas Sterling]

Ausgezeichnet!

This looks like a good Typesafe-formation reference that mentions Akka (which some of the earlier references don't):

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Scala-Language-Creator-Launches-Startup-Typesafe-838476/

I'll add that as a reference, and the archive itself, probably over the weekend.  Hopefully that and a reference to the Akka site will suffice.

Nicholas

On 01/14/2013 04:34 PM, √iktor Ҡlang wrote:

[Nicholas Sterling]

It would still be helpful to have a pre-Typesafe reference for Jonas's initial introduction of Akka. Anything on slideshare or google groups or ...?

The oldest reasonably respectable source is probably what we want.

Nicholas


On 01/14/2013 04:34 PM, √iktor Ҡlang wrote:

[√iktor Ҡlang]

This is the initial announcement of Akka AFAIK: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.scala/16486

I had my first talk with Jonas about it about a week earlier, the rest is history :-)

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[Nicholas Sterling]

That will do nicely! Thanks, Viktor.

Nicholas

[Jonas Bonér]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Roland Kuhn <goo...@rkuhn.info> wrote:
> Hi Nicholas,
>
> 14 jan 2013 kl. 21:53 skrev Nicholas Sterling:
>
> Not pushing, but any more thoughts on this? Any additional content you'd
> like to get in there? Happy with the way it's looking?
>
>
> Jonas, how about adding some references to Scala OTP to the historic
> background story? I don’t know those details, though.

I was planning on writing up an informal doc/FAQ entry on the history
from my personal perspective, don't know if that fits in a Wikipedia
article.

>
> The WP folks are probably going to bark about the fact that no references
> are cited for any of the data in there, but if there are no good references,
> I'll ask them what we should do.
>
>
> Hmm, I don’t have experience with this; with “data” you mean the historic
> data? What is typically used for that? Other references are indeed hard to
> come by, academic papers don’t help too much since what is not covered on
> the linked WP pages was developed by us. Should we link to the DynamoDB
> paper and something for Riak? That might help.

We can link to the Dynamo paper, accrual failure detector paper,
lamport/vector clocks, hewitt's/agha's papers, Joe's Erlang thesis.

>
> Regards,
>
>
> Dr. Roland Kuhn
> Akka Tech Lead
> Typesafe – The software stack for applications that scale.
> twitter: @rolandkuhn
>

[Jonas Bonér]

This is the first blog post I wrote on Akka:
http://jonasboner.com/2010/01/04/introducing-akka/
Unfortunately it is about 8 months after the first version was released.

[Jonas Bonér]

Hi Nicholas.

You might have seen this reference list already:
http://letitcrash.com/post/40599293211/where-akka-came-from
Not all can be quoted but some of them.

Tomorrow I'll write up a bullet list of the early Akka history for you
to base the article's history section on.

Thanks,

[Jonas Bonér]

Here is a logo you can add. Attached.

[Nicholas Sterling]

On 01/15/2013 01:51 PM, Jonas Bonér wrote:
> Here is a logo you can add. Attached.

Cool -- a logo helps to give a page substance. You're OK with this being *given* to Wikipedia Commons, right?

> You might have seen this reference list already:
> http://letitcrash.com/post/40599293211/where-akka-came-from
> Not all can be quoted but some of them.

I'll just reference that very page rather than the entries in it. That way we capture not only the articles themselves but also the claim that they influenced the design -- perfect.

>> Tomorrow I'll write up a bullet list of the early Akka history for you
>> to base the article's history section on.

Great. You know, I had originally just hoped to get a starter page out there, but after a bit more pounding I think we will have a pretty respectable entry.

Nicholas

[Jonas Bonér]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 9:15 PM, Nicholas Sterling
<nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 01/15/2013 01:51 PM, Jonas Bonér wrote:
>>
>> Here is a logo you can add. Attached.
>
>
> Cool -- a logo helps to give a page substance. You're OK with this being
> *given* to Wikipedia Commons, right?
>

What does that mean?

>
>> You might have seen this reference list already:
>> http://letitcrash.com/post/40599293211/where-akka-came-from
>> Not all can be quoted but some of them.
>
>
> I'll just reference that very page rather than the entries in it. That way
> we capture not only the articles themselves but also the claim that they
> influenced the design -- perfect.
>

Then you should reference this doc instead of the blog post:
https://docs.google.com/a/jonasboner.com/document/d/1nPMMIcUd7yXxXikdyc9cKRo1GkTQ5c8K9_8hj-464YE/pub

>
>>> Tomorrow I'll write up a bullet list of the early Akka history for you
>>> to base the article's history section on.
>
>
> Great. You know, I had originally just hoped to get a starter page out
> there, but after a bit more pounding I think we will have a pretty
> respectable entry.
>

I really appreciated all the help. Thanks.

> Nicholas

[Nicholas Sterling]

>> Cool -- a logo helps to give a page substance. You're OK with this being
>> *given* to Wikipedia Commons, right?
> What does that mean?

Well, I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps I'm confused, but check out this page:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Licensing_tutorial_en.svg

Note this text: "By sharing your work on Wikipedia Commons, you grant anyone permission to use, copy, modify, and sell it without notifying you."

But when I go to IBM's WP page, it has an IBM logo, and if you click on it a few times you get to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_logo.svg

Apparently it is in the public domain, not copyrighted, but trademark laws still apply.

I'm starting to feel a little uneasy about the legalities, so I guess I should not be the one to add a logo (although I think it's cool). You can always do that after the fact if you and your lawyers feel OK about it.

Nicholas

[Nicholas Sterling]

Guys, sorry to disappear like that.  The past few weeks have been medically interesting, and I am trying to catch up.  I haven't forgotten the Wikipedia page.

[Rich Dougherty]

Hi Nicholas

I'll help out too.

Cheers

Rich

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 8:18 PM, Nicholas Sterling <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Guys, sorry to disappear like that.  The past few weeks have been medically interesting, and I am trying to catch up.  I haven't forgotten the Wikipedia page.

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[Roland Kuhn]

Thanks, Nicholas and Rich!

Dr. Roland Kuhn
Akka Tech Lead

Typesafe – Empowering professional developers to build amazing apps.
twitter: @rolandkuhn

[Nicholas Sterling]

Rich, thanks for your additions.

It's good that you mention that Scala received an implementation of the actor model in 2006, but I think it begs the question "Then why did we need Akka?"  Can somebody give me the connective tissue between "Scala got actors in 2006" and "Jonas decided to write his own actor implementation in 2009" ?

I suspect that the answer has to do with performance, memory, remote actors, and perhaps other things, but I shouldn't guess.  And ideally there would be a reference, e.g. a web page or email addressing the need for a new implementation.

Nicholas

[Nicholas Sterling]

I'd like to be able to change the sentence "The Akka roadmap can be found here," which isn't really the way a Wikipedia article should make references, into two things:

• a reference to the roadmap on the line "The current emphasis is on clustering support"
• a link in the See Also section

The latter I can easily do, but I don't think I can get by with a reference to a Google Docs page that has no obvious association with either the Akka project or the people driving it (I could write my own Akka Roadmap page on Google Docs and say that the plan is to rewrite it in Visual Basic for the 2.2 release :^). Is there any chance that this could be put on akka.io?  If that's not possible, I could simply remove the line about the current emphasis.

It would probably suffice to have on akka.io a Roadmap page I can refer to that links to this Google Docs page and declares it the official Akka roadmap, if you want it out on GD for ease of editing.

Please advise.

Nicholas

[Nicholas Sterling]

Rich, I could use your help with these issues:

1. The first paragraph in History says that the initial public release was 0.6, but in two places below 0.5 is mentioned as the first release.  Were those somehow non-public?
2. The first and second paragraphs in History need to be merged.
3. Mention was made in an earlier email on this thread of replacing the module list with something less detailed, and I think that's appropriate.  We don't really want to duplicate the detail on akka.io here, but it would be nice to say that Akka is modular, explain what that means, and give a couple of key examples.

Are those things you can help with?

Nicholas

[Nicholas Sterling]

By the way, Wikipedia provides a GUI interface for generating those horrendous citations -- it's actually not hard at all. See the video on this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_referencing/3

Nicholas

[Rich Dougherty]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Nicholas Sterling <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's good that you mention that Scala received an implementation of the actor model in 2006, but I think it begs the question "Then why did we need Akka?"  Can somebody give me the connective tissue between "Scala got actors in 2006" and "Jonas decided to write his own actor implementation in 2009" ?

I suspect that the answer has to do with performance, memory, remote actors, and perhaps other things, but I shouldn't guess.  And ideally there would be a reference, e.g. a web page or email addressing the need for a new implementation.

That's a good question, but I can't find a solid reference for it, and I wasn't around at the time the decision was taken to write a separate actor implementation. I'll ask the Akka team and see if we can find some source material. I suspect the divergence may have been driven by Akka's different architectural needs (e.g. the Actor/ActorRef distinction given in the StackOverflow comments below) and also the benefit of having 100% control of the source for bug fixing.

A couple of possibly-useful pages:

http://klangism.tumblr.com/post/2497057136/all-actors-in-scala-compared

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14604264/why-is-scala-actors-deprecated-in-2-10

Cheers

Rich

[Rich Dougherty]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Nicholas Sterling <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd like to be able to change the sentence "The Akka roadmap can be found here," which isn't really the way a Wikipedia article should make references, into two things:

• a reference to the roadmap on the line "The current emphasis is on clustering support"

Yes, and it can be used as a reference to anywhere mentioning the content of future releases.

• a link in the See Also section

Great.

 

The latter I can easily do, but I don't think I can get by with a reference to a Google Docs page that has no obvious association with either the Akka project or the people driving it (I could write my own Akka Roadmap page on Google Docs and say that the plan is to rewrite it in Visual Basic for the 2.2 release :^). Is there any chance that this could be put on akka.io?  If that's not possible, I could simply remove the line about the current emphasis.

It would probably suffice to have on akka.io a Roadmap page I can refer to that links to this Google Docs page and declares it the official Akka roadmap, if you want it out on GD for ease of editing.

Please advise.

As a reference, how about the answer to "Akka is another big part of the Typesafe stack. What were some of the highlights of the 2.1 release?", in this article: http://java.dzone.com/articles/state-scala-2013. Also links to the roadmap.

But you're probably right that the roadmap should be linked-to or embedded-into akka.io.

[Rich Dougherty]

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Nicholas Sterling <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

1. The first paragraph in History says that the initial public release was 0.6, but in two places below 0.5 is mentioned as the first release.  Were those somehow non-public?

I think I wrote 0.6 based on the first Akka blog post/release announcement. Do you know the 0.5 number came from? I couldn't find any references to it. If you like, I can ask the Akka team what the first release was.

2. The first and second paragraphs in History need to be merged.

That's where things get hazy for me. :)

I know a bit about the very start of things (scala-otp, pre-Akka) and more recent history. From early Akka up to 2.1 is a bit unknown. Why don't I try and get a brief history from someone in the Akka team. If I can get that, would that be enough for you to work with?

3. Mention was made in an earlier email on this thread of replacing the module list with something less detailed, and I think that's appropriate.  We don't really want to duplicate the detail on akka.io here, but it would be nice to say that Akka is modular, explain what that means, and give a couple of key examples.

How about: "Akka ships with a number of modules. A core module defines the actor model. Other modules are available to extend the actor model with new features, such as network distribution; to integrate with third-party systems; and even to provide support for other concurrency models, such as Software Transactional Memory."

Cheers

Rich

[Nicholas Sterling]

On Monday, March 4, 2013 5:14:04 AM UTC-6, Rich Dougherty wrote:

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Nicholas Sterling <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

1. The first paragraph in History says that the initial public release was 0.6, but in two places below 0.5 is mentioned as the first release.  Were those somehow non-public?

I think I wrote 0.6 based on the first Akka blog post/release announcement. Do you know the 0.5 number came from? I couldn't find any references to it. If you like, I can ask the Akka team what the first release was.

Somebody on the Akka team added the table, and I think I copied the 0.5 from the table into that paragraph.

 

2. The first and second paragraphs in History need to be merged.

That's where things get hazy for me. :)

I know a bit about the very start of things (scala-otp, pre-Akka) and more recent history. From early Akka up to 2.1 is a bit unknown. Why don't I try and get a brief history from someone in the Akka team. If I can get that, would that be enough for you to work with?

Sure.  Just to be clear, my goal here is not to get more history (although that's OK, if there are references) but just to get those first two paragraphs to play together nicely.  Right now it looks like (because that's what happened) two people took decent stabs at a first history paragraph and put them in one after another.  I can probably iron it out, but if you want to get a version from the Akka team, that works too.

3. Mention was made in an earlier email on this thread of replacing the module list with something less detailed, and I think that's appropriate.  We don't really want to duplicate the detail on akka.io here, but it would be nice to say that Akka is modular, explain what that means, and give a couple of key examples.

How about: "Akka ships with a number of modules. A core module defines the actor model. Other modules are available to extend the actor model with new features, such as network distribution; to integrate with third-party systems; and even to provide support for other concurrency models, such as Software Transactional Memory."

That works for me!

Thanks for the quick responses, Rich.  I probably won't have time to actually hack on this again until the weekend, but I'll try to be responsive to email.

Nicholas 

[Nicholas Sterling]

I rewrote the paragraph on modules more or less as you suggested.

[Rich Dougherty]

Hi Nicholas

I've pinged the Akka team to check what the first release was.

I agree the history section needs some rewording, but unfortunately haven't had time yet. I'd be happy for you to "iron it out" as you suggested. :)

Cheers

Rich

Nicholas 

--

[Rich Dougherty]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:36 AM, Rich Dougherty <ri...@rd.gen.nz> wrote:

I've pinged the Akka team to check what the first release was.

The first release was 0.5, not 0.6. Here's what Jonas said:

I announced 0.5 in July 2009. Here is the tag: https://github.com/akka/akka/commit/v0.5
I did write the first blog post about Akka in Jan though, 7 months later. 

Cheers

Rich 

[Jonas Bonér]

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Rich Dougherty <ri...@rd.gen.nz> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Nicholas Sterling <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's good that you mention that Scala received an implementation of the actor model in 2006, but I think it begs the question "Then why did we need Akka?"  Can somebody give me the connective tissue between "Scala got actors in 2006" and "Jonas decided to write his own actor implementation in 2009" ?

I suspect that the answer has to do with performance, memory, remote actors, and perhaps other things, but I shouldn't guess.  And ideally there would be a reference, e.g. a web page or email addressing the need for a new implementation.

That's a good question, but I can't find a solid reference for it, and I wasn't around at the time the decision was taken to write a separate actor implementation. I'll ask the Akka team and see if we can find some source material. I suspect the divergence may have been driven by Akka's different architectural needs (e.g. the Actor/ActorRef distinction given in the StackOverflow comments below) and also the benefit of having 100% control of the source for bug fixing.

Yeah. There are many reasons, but the main ones being better performance, the ActorRef indirection, remoting and the way supervision works. 

A couple of possibly-useful pages:

http://klangism.tumblr.com/post/2497057136/all-actors-in-scala-compared

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14604264/why-is-scala-actors-deprecated-in-2-10

Cheers

Rich

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[Roland Kuhn]

Hi Nicholas,

sorry that this fell between some chairs: thanks very much for your efforts, I have just clicked the button to ask for review by wikipedia (after sorting the history sentences chronologically). Let’s see what they say.

Regards,

Roland

5 mar 2013 kl. 20:13 skrev Nicholas Sterling:

I rewrote the paragraph on modules more or less as you suggested.

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Dr. Roland Kuhn
Akka Tech Lead

Typesafe – Empowering professional developers to build amazing apps.
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[Nicholas Sterling]

Thanks, Roland. I wasn't blocked, actually -- I am just in the middle of a big release (using Akka!) and probably won't have spare cycles to work on this until it's over, a couple of months from now. Of course if that's a problem, anyone can jump in ....

[√iktor Ҡlang]

Sweet! Please do share if possible, we always love to hear about Akka projects :-)

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Nicholas Sterling <nicholas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, Roland.  I wasn't blocked, actually -- I am just in the middle of a big release (using Akka!) and probably won't have spare cycles to work on this until it's over, a couple of months from now.  Of course if that's a problem, anyone can jump in ....

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[Nicholas Sterling]

On 05/28/2013 03:10 PM, √iktor Ҡlang wrote:
> Sweet! Please do share if possible, we always love to hear about Akka projects :-)
>

We (Coraid) are using Scala/Akka/Spray/SBT (and some Python here and there) for a system that monitors/controls storage arrays. Soon we will use the same basic architecture for other servers as well. We are still learning, but it's already pretty great. I am soooo much happier working on this than on our previous Java/Spring/Ant system -- woohoo! Thank you guys for saving us from fiddling with locks and threads...

[Roland Kuhn]

Great to hear that, thanks for sharing!

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[Jonas Bonér]

Wonder if we should call it 'Akka (software runtime)' or 'Akka
(software platform)' instead of 'Akka (toolkit)' which is very vague.

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[Ilya Korniyko]

Created an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_Streams article.

On Wednesday, December 26, 2012 at 12:42:15 AM UTC+2, Nicholas Sterling wrote:

After reading about Akka's dataflow concurrency, I looked it up on Wikipedia.  I noticed that there were links at the bottom to various dataflow libraries, e.g. for Ruby, so I added a link for Akka:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow#External_links

But to my surprise, there is no entry for Akka itself to link to.  Nor is there an entry for Typesafe.  A reference to Akka in the "Actor Model" points to akka.io rather than a Wikipedia entry.

Are you deliberately keeping a low profile on Wikipedia, or is this just #3000 on the priority list? Do you want someone (could be me) to add starter entries for the two?  If so, it would help if you could point us at some historical info (founders, key contributors and dates, etc.).

Nicholas

[Akka Team]

Cool, thanks! :-)

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