Scala Akka Workshop - Connected Actors

In this workshop we will get hands-on experience with Akka Actors, which are a nice way of handling distributed programs.

Experienced and non-experienced Scala developers are welcome. (People new to Scala can pair up with experienced ones during the coding sessions.)

Proposed agenda:
• A short introduction to Akka Actors (30 min)
• Coding session 1: The goal of the first coding session is for everyone to get basic actors and actor communication running (45min)
• Coding session 2: Remoting will be the fun part :-) We'll get everybodys actors connected. Through a central host, actors will interact with actors of other workshop participants, competing in a simple game - Prisoner's Dilemma. (45min)

Disclaimer: I'm not an Akka expert, but I'll try to help where I can. To give everyone as much feedback as possible while dealing with remote Actor communication, and to make learning fun, we'll project on the wall which messages are sent to the host by each participant, and also a live "high-score" of the game.

Pre-conditions, i.e. things YOU have to do on your laptop before attending the workshop

• Clone this repo: https://github.com/clashcode/akka-workshop-quickstart

• Take it for a spin, i.e. make sure it builds. You will need SBT (http://www.scala-sbt.org/) 0.12.4 or 0.13 if you want to do that from the command-line.

• Make sure your Scala IDE of choice (Eclipse (http://scala-ide.org/), IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/), vim, Emacs, Card Puncher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hand-operated_Card_Punch-2.jpg), ...) is in good shape and that you import/open the project in it!!

(Optional) Follow the conversation in our Scala Vienna Google Group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/scala-vienna).

Check out the Workshop Cheat Sheet (http://blog.papauschek.com/2013/11/akka-workshop-cheat-sheet/)