Scalability can be challenging when database access is needed: the common approach is to block the thread until a response is received. ReactiveMongo is a MongoDB Scala Driver that provides fully non-blocking asynchronous I/O operation that increases the scalability of your system. In a previous post we have seen how to build a REST Api… Continue reading How to Integrate ReactiveMongo in your Akka Spray Application
Category: Tutorial
How to Supervise Akka Actors
Supervision is one of the core operations that an Actor can fulfill. Handling errors is not always easy in a classic object oriented programming context as exceptions can be difficult to predict as they are fully embedded in the normal execution flow. In the Akka Actor Model, errors are handled in a well-structured isolated execution… Continue reading How to Supervise Akka Actors
How to test Actors with Akka TestKit and Spec2
Actors are a really powerful tool to handle concurrency thanks to their message-based model. However, they can be tricky to test: sending and processing messages is done asynchronously. Moreover, their status is hidden internally and it cannot be easily accessed to make assertions on it. The Akka Team has created a library, called akka-testkit, to… Continue reading How to test Actors with Akka TestKit and Spec2
How to build a REST api with Spray and Akka
Spray is a library written on top of Akka and Scala that allows to quickly create REST interfaces. It is becoming more and more popular in the Scala community because it is easy to use and performant thanks to this asynchronous, actor-based model. This article describes how to efficiently exploit Spray to create a simple… Continue reading How to build a REST api with Spray and Akka
How to use Case Classes in Scala
Scala has adopted many concepts from other functional programming languages: higher-order functions from Haskell, actors model from Erlang, futures from Clojure, etc. However, Scala has also introduced new tools in the functional programming world: case classes is one of them. Case classes are a special type of classes, as the compiler automatically adds some useful… Continue reading How to use Case Classes in Scala
Stateful objects: use them to lie!
Sometimes we want to hide/protect our variables — the classic concept of encapsulation in object oriented programming. We’d like to write a Scala class to manage someone’s age. In particular, we’d like to: - lie on our age if we are not teens anymore (you never know!) - put some validation to avoid negative age values Our… Continue reading Stateful objects: use them to lie!
Shared package code? Fear no more!
Sometimes code is common to all the classes of a specific package (e.g.: conversions between objects, custom logs, shared operations, etc). Our lovely Java doesn’t seem to have a convenient way of declaring code as part of a package, rather than just a class….but FEAR NO MORE! Let’s see how we can this in Scala using package objects.… Continue reading Shared package code? Fear no more!
