It is becoming pretty clear that Reactive is the next big thing in software. But there aren’t very many resources yet about how to actually build a Reactive application. Recently I hosted a webinar about “Building Reactive Apps with the Typesafe Platform” where I tried to explain Reactive in a tangible way using the Reactive Stocks sample app from Typesafe Activator. Here is the recording of that presentation:
Let me know what you think. Thanks!
Tonight I will be doing a question and answer session at the Seattle Scala User Group. So bring your Scala, Akka, and Play Framework questions! Hope to see you there.
Next Monday at the San Francisco Scala User Group I will be co-presenting about Akka, Heroku, sbt and BlueEyes with Mike Slinn - a long time friend and mentor. In the presentation we will be talking about a building client/server apps with HTML5 on the client and Scala & JSON services on the server. We will also show how to deploy these applications on the cloud with Heroku. Hope to see you there!
I’ve been intrigued by Akka for a while but finally I was able to take it for a spin. The first thing I wanted to learn was how to compose Futures. Composing Futures provides a way to do two (or more) things at the same time and then wait until they are done. Typically in Java this would be done with a <del datetime="2011-09-23T22:23:58+00:00">CyclicBarrier</del> ExecutorService. But setting up the code to manage a (UPDATE: Turns out it’s not very challenging, I just didn’t know how to do it. I’m new to concurrency in Java and didn’t find much on this stuff - probably because I didn’t even know what to search for.) So I put together a quick little demo that shows how to do the same thing with Futures in Akka.CyclicBarrier is challenging.