Scala - Akka Actor Kernel - Re: [scala] Lift and Goat Rodeo. Enterprise scala actors: introducing the Akka framework. Last week me and some of my colleagues had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of an excellent training given by Jonas Bonér.
The topic was his new pet project: the Akka framework. Perhaps you've played around with Scala lately, and also have taken the first steps in using its Actor library. Simply stated, an Actor is a unit of execution that (usually asynchronously) processes messages and encapsulate their state. An actor does not expose its state, and messages are processed sequentially. The Actor model has been around for quite some time, but today the best-known Actor implementation is Erlang. Scaling out messaging applications with Scala Actors and AMQP. We have been sandboxing various alternatives towards scaling out Java/JMS based services that we implemented for our clients quite some time back.
The services that form the stack comprise of dispatchers and routers meant to handle heavy load and perform heavy duty processing on a huge number of trade messages streaming in from the front and middle offices. I have been exploring lots of options including some of the standard ones like grid based distribution of processing and some wildly insane options like using Erlang/OTP.