Akka Remote Development on One Machine

[Joseph Mansigian]

Hello,

   I would like to develop an Akka actor based application that has actors that span the Internet.  It would be very convenient for me if I could do the early stages of this development all on one machine.  I would like to have two JVM running on one machine but have the actor systems and actors on these two JVM be remote to each other, not local actors,  and have these remote actors be addressable exactly as they would be if they were across the world from each other ( location transparency ) except they would use a real remote host in the path instead of 127.0.0.1.  I want to accomplish a fan out to anywhere on the Internet without rewriting any Scala code although config or deployment info changes are certainly Okay.

>  Can I work this way?

>  If I can work this way what are any special constraints because I am on one machine?  I feel I understand remoting pretty well from Akka documentation but still not averse to re-reading if I know what to look for.

> Do you have any good examples of a project like this or a tutorial discussion of a project? 

Thank you for helping,  Joe

[Rob Crawford]

Docker containers -- each JVM gets their own container, Docker will handle the networking between them.

[Johan Andrén]

Even if you use loopback (127.0.0.1) for the two actor systems to communicate, communication is done through remoting, with messages being serialized etc. just like if they were on "real remote hosts". 

If you want to do it to get real world latencies/throughputs like with separate physical nodes communicating over a physical network then internal networking between virtual machines will likely not give you identical behaviour.

--

Johan 

Akka Team