Chapter 3. Your first Akka.NET application

The first few chapters covered what reactive architecture means, as well as the key reasons you’ll likely want to use it. You’ve seen how the aim of a reactive system is to create applications that are responsive to the end user, and how this requires applications to work, even when struggling with the demands of scale or malfunctioning components. We’ve also covered the key things you need to consider when designing a reactive application.

For the rest of the book, we’ll consider how you can write reactive systems that follow the principles laid out in the Reactive Manifesto: guidelines designed to suggest solutions that many organizations have found effective for solving their problems. There are many means of developing reactive systems, but we’ll focus on one in particular. You’ll use the actor model as the underlying basis for your reactive systems, and the implementation you’ll use is Akka.NET, a framework designed for writing concurrent applications using the actor model in .NET.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a basic actor that can receive messages, and you’ll send this actor some messages. You’ll then be able to adapt this actor and start to build your own, capable of performing more-complex functions.

3.1. Setting up an application

3.2. Actors

3.3. Deploying an actor

3.4. Communicating with actors

3.5. Case study: Actors, concurrency, and phone billing

Summary