Presentation: TweetUp up and Out: Scaling software with Akka

Developing a concurrent and/or distributed applications often involves choosing between productivity and scalability - do I use easy-to-understand paradigms that don't provide maximal throughput, or do I create complex and fast code that's difficult to understand and maintain? Akka was designed to eliminate the need to make this choice by adopting the Actor concurrency model found in other languages such as Erlang, and bringing it to the JVM. It is designed to both scale up (by using multiple cores or CPUs on a single machine) and out (by distributing work among multiple VMs), and to support both via configuration and automatic VM clustering rather than code changes. It is also open source, under the Apache V2 license.

This talk will cover several different aspects of Java concurrency, including:

* What Akka is, how it is implemented and how you can make use of it in your application
* A walkthrough of some of the new Java concurrency features (in JSR166), in particular the new Fork/Join library
* How Akka is utilizing these concurrency features in its Actor and Future libraries
* New features of Akka 2 including self-healing actor systems, location transparency, routing/load-balancing and clustering

Level: intermediate