Using Futures in Akka Actors

Question

I\'m just starting to learn Akka Actors in Scala. My understanding is that messages received by an Actor are queued in an Actor\'s mailbox, and processed one at a time. By pro

Answer 1

If you need to mutate state in futures without blocking incoming messages you might want to reconsider redesigning your actor model. I would introduce separate actors for each task you would use those futures on. After all, an actor's main task is to maintain its state without letting it escape thus providing safe concurrency. Define an actor for those long running task whose responsibility is only to take care of that.

Instead of taking care of the state manually you might want to consider using akka's FSM so you get a much cleaner picture of what changes when. I presonally prefer this approach to ugly variables when I'm dealing with more complex systems.