Akka - from Beginner to Intermediate Training Course

Introduction,  environment Setup and a first application

• The Akka framework
  • The Actor model (definition & origins)
  • Fault tolerance
  • Location transparency
  • Scaling
  • Actors In Akka
• Setting up a Scala/Maven environment
• A first application in Akka
  • Create the project
  • Defining message Classes
  • Defining actor Classes
  • Defining the execution Class
• Architecture & configuration files

Actors & Typed Actors

• Anatomy of an Actor
• Creating Actors (default constructors, custom constructors, actor hierarchy)
• Messaging Models
  • Sending messages
    • Fire and forget
    • Send and receive
  • Receiving messages
  • Replying to messages
  • Forwarding messages
• Stop Actors
• Kill Actors

Fault Tolerance - Actor Lifecycle & State

• Let it crash         
• Supervision & supervisor strategy
  • One for one
  • All for one
• Lifecycle callbacks
• Receiving Messages
• Online/Offline state
• Hotswap: Become / Unbecome (& stash)
• Finite State Machine FSM
  • States
  • Behaviour

Concurrency

• Blocking vs event driven API
• Using futures & promises

Dispatchers & Routes

• Dispatchers
  • Dispatcher as a pattern
  • Executor & Dispatchers
  • Types of dispatcher / Which to use when
    • Default dispatcher
    • Pinned dispatcher
    • CallingThread dispatcher
    • Balancing dispatcher
• Routers
  • Types of Routers
  • Router usage
  • Router usage via application.conf
  • Router usage for distributed actors
  • Dynamically resizing routers
  • Custom Router

Clustering

• About the Akka Cluster & the CAP theorem
• Defining a cluster
• Cluster Member Status
• Routing messages to the cluster
• Addressing remote actors

Mailboxes

• Types of mailboxes
• Durable mailboxes
• Circuit breakers

Transactions (time permitting)

Testing

• Writing unit test
• Access the actor reference
• Testing actor behaviour
• Testing exception scenarios

JMX and REST interfaces

• RESTful API
• JMX