What are the language and product alternatives to Akka?

Question

Right now I\'m looking at Play Framework and like it a lot. One of the parts heavy advertised amongst the features offered in Play is Akka.

In order to better understand

Answer 1

The best place to start is a great Akka official documentation. I think the closest product/framework to Akka is erlang language. I guess (I haven't used Play framework) Akka is used there to implement Comet and other asynchronous processing.

rabbitmq is somewhat similar in ideas (infrastructure for sending messages), note that RabbitMQ is even written in erlang, but they have slightly different use-cases. I would say that while RabbitMQ focuses on message passing, Akka is more about actors (message receivers and senders).