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Today’s podcast features Jonas Bonér, the creator of the Akka framework. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, especially to Episode #37 with Alex Miller on Java Concurrency, here is an alternative approach to providing scalability on the Java VM.
Akka features an implementation of Actors, Software Transactional Memory, and Transactors, a hybrid approach to working with STM inside of Actors themselves. Jonas also provides a mechanism for writing these components inside of the Java language as well.
Actors are not a direct part of the Scala language. Rather, they are implemented as a library. There are, in fact, at least three implementations. Jonas Bonér’s Akka framework includes actors as well as access to Software Transactional Memory. In this episode, my colleague Jamie Allen and I interview Jonas to try to pull apart what Actors and Software Transactional Memory are, and how they can help developers write highly scalable, concurrent applications.
Links:
- The Akka Mountain in Sweden (Akka is named after the mountain)
- The Akka framework homepage is www.akkasource.org (or www.akkasource.com or even www.letitcrash.com)
- A good blog entry about Akka
- The high level overview of Akka from the akkasource site
- Jonas’ home page and the Akka twitter handle