By, Riccardo Terrell
Writing correct concurrent, faulttolerant, scalable applications is no simple task. The struggle is generally the result of using the wrong tools or wrong level of abstraction. The Actor based concurrency model aims to simplify this process. The actor model is a mathematical model of concurrent computation originated in 1973 by Carl Hewitt, Peter Bishop, and Richard Steiger. Actor programming is one of the most widely applicable programming models, which provides support for concurrency, by improving distribution, error detection, and fault tolerance. As such, it’s a good fit for the kinds of programming problems we find ourselves faced with in today’s increasingly distributed world Actors raise the abstraction level and provide a better platform to build correct concurrent and scalable applications. This presentation will introduce concepts in architecture such as immutability, isolation and asynchronous processing utilizing tools such as Akka.NET which is a .NET port of the popular JVM framework Akka. The goal is to provide solid knowledge of and foundation for the Actor model. Following the presentation, attendees will take with them enough material to start to use and leverage the Actor model to write successful concurrent applications.