About this Book
This book introduces the Akka toolkit and explains its most important modules. We focus on the actor programming model and the modules that support actors for building concurrent and distributed applications. Throughout the book, we take time to show how code can be tested, which is an important aspect of day-to-day software development. We use the Scala programming language in all our examples.
After the basics of coding and testing actors, we look at all the important aspects that you will encounter when building a real-world application with Akka.
This book is intended for anyone who wants to learn how to build applications with Akka. The examples are in Scala, so it’s expected that you already know some Scala or are interested in learning some Scala as you go along. You’re expected to be familiar with Java, as Scala runs on top of the JVM.
The book includes seventeen chapters.
Chapter 1 introduces Akka actors. You’ll learn how the actor programming model solves a couple of key issues that traditionally make scaling applications very hard.
Chapter 2 dives directly into an example HTTP service built with Akka to show how quickly you can get a service up and running in the cloud. It gives a sneak peek into what you’ll learn in chapters to come.
Chapter 3 is about unit testing actors using ScalaTest and the akka-testkit module.