Actors in Scala

Description

Recent trends in computer architecture make concurrency and parallelism an essential ingredient of efficient program execution. The actor model of concurrency allows you to express real-world concurrency in a natural way using concurrent processes that communicate via asynchronous messages.

Scala is a programming language for the Java virtual machine, providing excellent support for both object-oriented and functional programming. By including a powerful actor framework in its standard library, Scala offers a compelling approach to tackle concurrent programming. Scala's actors let you apply the actor concurrency model to the JVM, enabling real-world solutions that are efficient, scalable, and robust.

Published by Artima, this is the first book on Scala's actors, co-authored by the creator and lead maintainer, Philipp Haller, and Frank Sommers. Starting with the fundamentals of the actor concurrency model, this book offers a comprehensive tutorial on practical programming with actors in Scala. It enables you to leverage the full power of today's and tomorrow's multi-core processors by describing both basic and advanced features of Scala's actor framework in-depth.

CONTENTS:

Contents ix

List of Figures xii

List of Listings xiii

Foreword xvii

Acknowledgments xix

Introduction xxi

1. Concurrency Everywhere 3

2. Messages All the Way Up 15

3. Scala's Language Support for Actors 31

4. Actor Chat 45

5. Event-Based Programming 55

6. Exceptions, Actor Termination, and Shutdown 71

7. Customizing Actor Execution 85

8. Remote Actors 101

9. Distributed and Parallel Computing 107

10. Akka Actors 125

11. API Overview 145

Bibliography 159

About the Authors 161

Index 163