Five Akka / Scala Concurrency Options

Writing concurrent programs that can run in multiple threads and on multiple cores is crucial but daunting. Akka and Scala together provide five concurrency options: java.util.concurrent, Scala parallel collections, Akka futures (subsumed into Scala 2.10), Akka dataflow and Akka actors. Mike Slinn will discuss all of them, contrast them, offer guidance as to when to use each, and describe some typical usage patterns. The presentation will be based on selected material from Mike Slinn's new book "Composable Futures with Akka 2.0 for Java and Scala (http://slinnbooks.com/books/futures/)", plus additional content.

Klout API uses Akka to scale to over 1 billion api requests per day. David Ross is a software engineer on the Klout API team. He will describe how Klout uses the Future monad to write beautiful concurrent code and untyped Actors to hide state and react to asynchronous events. Not to mention, Akka powers the Play! Framework on which entire Klout's serving infrastructure runs.

Akka makes writing correct concurrent applications easier. However, it is still possible to run into concurrency problems such as deadlocks and race conditions if you aren't careful. Andrew Headrick will share some patterns and best practices to follow to avoid these issues when using actors and futures.

Andrew Headrick is the Backend Architect at Ticketfly, the world's greatest and fastest growing event ticketing company. Our new reserved ticketing platform ( codenamed Diva ) is a highly concurrent, very stateful, distributed application built with Thrift and Akka using a CQRS architecture.

As usual, the schedule for the event is:

6:30 -- networking, food

6:50 -- announcements

7:00 -- 7:25 David Ross

7:25 -- 8:40 Mike Slinn

8:40 -- 9:15 Andrew Headrick

9:00 -- Q&A, more networking afterward

Klout is providing water, soda and beer and food.

We would like to record this event, but that has not been arranged yet. Care to help?

Michael Slinn will present the same talk at Box in Los Altos on June 11 (https://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Scala-Enthusiasts/events/64044672/). Please only register for one of these events.

We will give away two copies of IntelliJ IDEA 11 for personal use, and two copies of JRebel. Two free PDF copies of "Actors in Scala (http://www.artima.com/shop/actors_in_scala)" by Philipp Haller and Frank Sommers and published by Artima will also be given away. If you did not register with your full name you will not be eligible to win anything. You can edit your name by going to Members / My Profile / Edit Profile.

We'll release seats in batches, spread from now till the day of the event, to make sure everyone who really wants to get it does get in. Watch this space for seats!