Chapter 13. Distributed messaging and Java enterprise integration
This chapter covers
- Using Lift’s AMQP support
- Building distributed systems using Akka
- Using Lift’s integration with the Java Persistence API
The first part of this chapter is all about distributed and concurrent programming. You’ll see how you can utilize Lift’s baked-in AMQP module to build reliable message-based workflows atop a friendly actor-based abstraction. In addition, we’ll look at Akka, the concurrency toolkit and scalability runtime.
This first section of the chapter will serve as an introduction to messaging. Messaging is a much broader topic than we can cover in this book, but you’ll learn how to leverage Lift’s support for AMQP and how to take advantage of the powerful actor abstractions Akka provides, such as supervised and remote actors. These technologies are becoming increasingly popular in the Scala ecosystem, so it’s good to have a grounding in them and an appreciation of the flexibility and power that message-based systems provide.
Continuing with the theme of application development on a larger enterprise scale, section 13.2 is all about utilizing the Java Persistence API (JPA) persistence framework from Java Enterprise Edition (JEE). JPA is much more complicated than other persistence systems covered in this book, so this section focuses on the Lift wrappers around this technology rather than offering a guide to JPA in general.