Akka for REST polling

Question

I\'m trying to interface a large Scala + Akka + PlayMini application with an external REST API. The idea is to periodically poll (basically every 1 to 10 minutes) a root URL and

Answer 1

Why not create a master poller, which then kicks of async resource requests on the schedule?

I'm no expert using Akka, but I gave this a shot:

The poller object that iterates through the list of resources to fetch:

import akka.util.duration._
import akka.actor._
import play.api.Play.current
import play.api.libs.concurrent.Akka

object Poller {
  val poller = Akka.system.actorOf(Props(new Actor {
    def receive = {
      case x: String => Akka.system.actorOf(Props[ActingSpider], name=x.filter(_.isLetterOrDigit)) ! x
    }
  }))

  def start(l: List[String]): List[Cancellable] =
    l.map(Akka.system.scheduler.schedule(3 seconds, 3 seconds, poller, _))

  def stop(c: Cancellable) {c.cancel()}
}

The actor that reads the resource asynchronously and triggers more async reads. You could put the message dispatch on a schedule rather than call immediately if it was kinder:

import akka.actor.{Props, Actor}
import java.io.File

class ActingSpider extends Actor {
  import context._
  def receive = {
    case name: String => {
      println("reading " + name)
      new File(name) match {
        case f if f.exists() => spider(f)
        case _ => println("File not found")
      }
      context.stop(self)
    }
  }

  def spider(file: File) {
    io.Source.fromFile(file).getLines().foreach(l => {
      val k = actorOf(Props[ActingSpider], name=l.filter(_.isLetterOrDigit))
      k ! l
    })
  }
}