In this talk from the 2012 Northeast Scala Symposium, Dag Liodden, VP of Engineering at Tapad, takes a pragmatic look at how Akka and Akka actors can be used in practice, looking at architecture and code examples from a real-time ad trading system.
Ever since it's first release, Akka has been receiving a lot of interest and praise from the Scala community. With a tagline promising to deliver "Event-driven, scalable and fault-tolerant architectures", who wouldn't want to use it? The framework does indeed deliver, but it's not a general purpose technology that can or should be applied anywhere. Dag starts off introducing us to Akka, then moves into real use cases, while addressing many of the strengths and potential pain points of the framework.
Dag's slides:
The Northeast Scala Symposium is a yearly gathering of the Scala community, made possible by efforts of Boston, Philadelphia and New York Scala enthusiasts.