This is second post in a series of “Actors using Scala & Akka”. In Part 1, we saw how to

1. Create new scala project and run it
2. Create new actor system
3. Create new behaviour to handle messages and modify state
4. Spawn a new system actor using given behaviour
5. Send messages to the actor

In this articles we will take a look at

1. AskPattern ( how to get a reply from actors )
2. SpawnProtocol ( spawning user actors instead of system actors )

Before we jump into ask pattern, we should have basic understanding of some scala concepts

• Futures
• Execution Context
• …

Since I am stuck at home due to Covid-19 pandemic. With nothing else to do, I thought the best use of time would be to continue my blog series about actors. In the last article, we saw what are actors, their properties and how these properties can be useful for writing concurrent and stateful applications. It was all theory. In this article, I will demonstrate how to write your first akka actor in scala using IntelliJ IDE. Hop on even if you don’t know scala.

IDE & Project Setup

Scala development can be done in many IDEs. We will use IntelliJ with scala plugin.

Introduction

The actor model of computing was introduced by Carl Hewitt in 1973. This model makes it easy to tackle the problem of concurrency and state management. The model treats an “actor” as a primitive unit of computing.

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PS: You can see all the features of version 3 here.

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I have published multiple projects to nuget and I feel happy about it because I have not only helped my teammates but also helped anyone in the word who otherwise would have had to re-write that functionality. …