Preface

Writing good, concurrent, and distributed applications is hard. Having just finished a project that demanded a lot of low-level concurrency programming in Java, I was on the lookout for simpler tools for the next project, which promised to be even more challenging.

In March 2010 I noticed a tweet by Dean Wampler that made me look into Akka:

W00t! RT @jboner: #akka 0.7 is released: http://bit.ly/9yRGSB

After some investigation into the source code and building a prototype, we decided to use Akka. It was immediately apparent that this new programming model would really simplify the problems we experienced in the previous project.

I convinced Rob Bakker to join me in a bleeding-edge technology adventure, and together we took the leap to build our first project with Scala and Akka. We reached out early to Jonas Bonér (creator of Akka) for help, and later found out that we were among the first-known production users of Akka. We completed the project, and many others followed; the benefits of using Akka were obvious every time.

In those days, there wasn’t a lot of information available online, so I decided to start blogging about it as well as contribute to the Akka project.

I was completely surprised when I was asked to write this book. I asked Rob Bakker if he wanted to write the book together. Later, we realized we needed more help, and Rob Williams joined us. He had been building projects with Java and Akka.