Akka

The Akka framework extends the original Actor model in Scala by adding extraction capabilities such as support for typed Actor, message dispatching, routing, load balancing, and partitioning, as well as supervision and configurability [12:7].

The Akka framework can be downloaded from the http://akka.io/ website or through the Typesafe Activator at http://www.typesafe.com/platform.

Akka simplifies the implementation of the Actor model by encapsulating some of the details of Scala Actor in the akka.actor.Actor and akka.actor.ActorSystem classes.

The three methods you want to override are as follows:

• prestart: This is an optional method that is invoked to initialize all the necessary resources such as file or database connection before the Actor is executed

• receive: This method defines the Actor's behavior and returns a partial function of the PartialFunction[Any, Unit] type

• postStop: This is an optional method to clean up resources such as releasing memory, closing database connections,...