Akka Actors

I really like the notion of using akka actors in Java. Basically it is trying to solve the problem of easily writing thread safe code. It does this by passing immutable messages to actors which process them. The idea is that the actor should be stateless and only act upon the immutable object it's given. They also appear to have Software Transactional Memory (STM) for when you do need mutable object and locking.


I have doubts novice programmers which couldn't write a correct singleton or proper thread safe class would be able to use akka to write thread safe code. I could see them creating all kind of actors which are not thread safe.


I did find it was really easy to get a lot of concurrency almost to a fault where my laptop was maxed out and overheating. Of course that may have been my fault as I gave it an infinite computation to work on.


I don't understand why packages don't have remoting support built for the Servlet API. Akka has a remoting support but I always work in a full J2EE container so getting ports opened and bypassing it would not be an option. I would like to know who needs stand alone remoting and is not working with at least Tomcat.

I'll definitely check akka out in more depth.