Summit 2014: Scale up your thinking: Reactive programming with Scala and Akka / Lior Shapsa, Yardena Meiman

The day has finally arrived, cloud scale apps and big data challenges drove us, the modern developers, into a new arena of thinking, the arena of concurrent programming and horizontal scale. The technology is already here: Scala Actor model offers message-based concurrency and provides us with new programming primitives. But that’s not enough… the real challenge is in our minds and we need to redesign the way we think of solving problems. Or in other words: learn how to actually use this new model to design actors and messages instead of classes, methods or functions. In this session we will show you how to make this leap and start thinking horizontally. We will present and compare several actor design patterns, outline best practices and pitfalls of Akka, and demonstrate how we use Akka for data acquisition and manipulation in our project in VMware Israel. We will also touch on the subject of introducing new technology, and Scala in particular, in a large company. MP3