Introduction to Akka for Java Developers

Program Overview

In this program we introduce the core concepts of Akka, such as the actor model, supervision, and the fundamentals of message-based concurrency. Participants will learn to craft highly resilience, scalable systems that are ready to deploy to cloud-based infrastructure such as AWS and Google Compute Engine.

What to expect

This is a 3 day hands-on program with a strong emphasis on participation. Developers will require access to a laptop along with internet connectivity to participate. We will provide all of the required dependencies to follow along with exercises during program delivery.

Curriculum

• Java 8 for Akka
  • An introduction to the core features of Java 8 that are beneficial to Akka developers
  • Collections in core Java 8
  • Lambdas and SAMs
  • Using Javaslang for functional-style Java programming
  • Mutable vs immutable types
  • Modern concurrency patterns in Java
• Akka Basics
  • An introduction to the actor model
  • An introduction to Akka’s core messaging patterns, ask and tell
• Fault Tolerance
  • State and supervision
  • Event sourcing with persistence
• Distribution
  • An introduction to working with remote actor-systems
  • Cluster
  • Groups, routers and the event bus
  • Sharding
  • Cluster migration
• Configuration
  • Dispatchers and isolation
  • Deployment as configuration

Prerequisites

This is an introductory course suitable for developers with a solid understanding of Java, including the new collections API, streams, and lambda syntax. Key features of Java 8 will also be covered as a refresher. The cirriculum is purpose-designed with the enterprise Java developer in mind. Experience with Java concurrency such as threads and fork/join are helpful but not required.