Fwd: Re: Akka 2.x roadmap

Fwd to list

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "√iktor Ҡlang" <viktor.klang@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 20, 2011 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: [scala-user] Akka 2.x roadmap
To: "Jason Zaugg" <jzaugg@gmail.com>

On Sep 20, 2011 9:37 AM, "Jason Zaugg" <jzaugg@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 8:01 AM, Debasish Ghosh
> <ghosh.debasish@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Another good article on this similar issue is Steve Vinoski's Convenience
> > over Correctness
> > (http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IEEE-Convenience_Over_Correctness.pdf). He
> > also warns against the traditional RPC mechanisms that tend to hide local
> > and remote abstractions behind a uniform API. This is convenient to the
> > user, but leaks heavily with non trivial systems. Here's what he says ..
> > "The illusion of RPC — the idea that a distributed call can be treated
> > the same as a local call — ignores not only latency and partial failure but
> > also the concerns that spell the difference between a scalable networked
> > system with good performance capabilities and a nonscalable one whose
> > performance characteristics are dictated entirely by the RPC
> > infrastructure."
> > When I saw the phrase Location Transparency in Jonas' roadmap document for
> > Akka 2.0, immediately I was also reminded of both the Jim Waldo paper and
> > the one by Steve Vinoski.
> > Steve of course goes on to say that the way to mitigate this is asynchronous
> > messaging and the actor model of Erlang. And Akka is NOT about synchronous
> > blocking RPC calls, it encourages the non-blocking philosophy all the way.
> > Supervisors ensure that exceptions / crashes are handled properly, I guess
> > that addresses Steve's concerns of partial failures as well.
>
> You could say that Akka hides local calls behind a uniform interface
> for remote calls.

Exactly, Akka does in-vm message dispatch optimizations.

V

>
> -jason