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Actors in Scala Philipp Haller, Frank Sommers
Publisher: Artima Inc

However, of late, I've been reading a lot about Scala actors, and I had some time over the Christmas holidays, so I decided to bite the bullet and learn the language. In my use case, I have a variable number of independent ActorSystems. Akka is a library for building concurrent scalable applications using the Actor Model. On the other hand seeing how actors are dynamically typed reminded me of my experiments with dynamic, clone based languages (Io, Ioke, Self, JavaScript). First, I just finished editing the last pages of the book last week, and was able to update all of the code to the latest versions: Scala 2.10.x, SBT 0.12.x, Play 2.1.x, etc. Scala 2.8 Remote Actors in Scala 2.7.7-final. One thing that always surprised me though is that while being based on Scala, which is a very type-safe language, the elementary construct in Akka – an actor – is not really type safe. I thought I'd base one of my projects on Scala actors. After a lot of heavy use of the remote actors libraries in Scala, I noticed that something seemed to be leaking memory. Akka is actor based, event-driven framework for building highly concurrent, reliable applications. As part of converting Mimprint from Java to Scala, I wanted to switch the concurrency model from using Java Threads to using Scala Actors. We have been using Akka Actors in all of our Scala projects for about a year now and have been very impressed. The Scala Cookbook is coming soon. As a new system starts up, it initiates a simple Syn/Ack procedure with the command and control system, allowing the C&C to deploy remote actors. Among the many native Scala libraries we have tried and adopted, Akka stands out as the most indispensable. Shouldn't come a surprise that concept of a future is ubiquitous in a system like that. But I promised to talk about scala.util.DynamicVariable in the blog post's title, didn't I? The good part is that once I had my misconceptions cleared out, it was much easier to understand some weird parts of the Scala standard actors, and the path to understanding the design of Akka became much clearer.