Introduction to the Actor Model for Concurrent Computation: Tech Talks @ AppNexus

In this tech talk, John Murray, Senior Software Engineer at AppNexus, serves up an introduction to Actor Model principals and concepts and gives a look at how we can construct parallel systems using the Akka framework.

Actor Models is a computational model for designing concurrent, distributed systems around the principal of self-contained Actors which operate on sending and receiving messages. While the idea has been around since the mid to late 70's, it is now gaining more traction with frameworks such as Akka and Celluloid as well as languages such as Go, which share many similar principals.

[areoh]

so, don't use actors when you don't have a state, and the 'demo' shows prime number search :) anyway, good talk.

[timmark]

@22 you mentioned the actor would respond back to the http. How does one do that? How does an actor after processing go back to same thread that made the call