Akka implements a unique hybrid of:
- The Actor model (Actors and Active Objects), which gives you:
- Concurrency (high-level and simple)
- Asynchronous, non-blocking and highly performant components.
- Supervision with “let-it-crash” semantics. Components are loosely coupled and restarted upon failure.
- Software Transactional Memory (STM).
- BASE and ACID persistence – Pluggable Eventually Consistent or ACID distributed scalable persistent storage.
- Remoting – Distributed services with supervision and error management
- REST (JAX-RS) and Comet bindings.
- Monitoring and Management
Akka can be used in two different ways:
- As a library: used by a web app, to be put into ‘WEB-INF/lib’
- As a kernel: stand-alone kernel, embedding the servlet container
See the Use-case and Deployment Scenarios for details.
If you are new to Akka then I suggest you start with either the:
- High Level View; which is outlining the different modules in Akka.
- Use-case and Deployment Scenarios; outlining how and in which use-case and deployment scenarios can I use Akka?
- Examples; showing how to build a RESTful, transactional, persistent Active Object and Actor.
After that you can dive into the Reference Manual.
Akka has pretty thorough reference documentation. Covering examples, APIs and configuration.
The latest distribution can be found in the downloads section
If you have questions and/or feedback: please sign up to the Akka User mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/akka-user
Scalable Solutions AB is providing a variety of professional support packages for Akka, please visit their website for details:
http://scalablesolutions.se
This software is licensed under the Apache 2 license, quoted below.
Copyright 2009 Scalable Solutions AB <http://scalablesolutions.se>
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not
use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of
the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT
WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under
the License.