Design patterns for Agent / Actor based concurrent design [closed]

Question

Recently i have been getting into alternative languages that support an actor/agent/shared nothing architecture - ie. scala, clojure etc (clojure also supports shared state).

So far most of the documentation that I have read focus around the intro level. What I am looking for is more advanced documentation along the gang of four but instead shared nothing based.

Why ? It helps to grok the change in design thinking. Simple examples are easy, but in a real world java application (single threaded) you can have object graphs with 1000's of members with complex relationships. But with agent based concurrency development it introduces a whole new set of ideas to comprehend when designing large systems. ie. Agent granularity - how much state should one agent manage - implications on performance etc or are their good patterns for mapping shared state object graphs to agent based system. tips on mapping domain models to design. Discussions not on the technology but more on how to BEST use the technology in design (real world "complex" examples would be great).

Answer 1

Even if I cannot come up with any good real world examples that provide you with design patterns straight up, there are a few places to start.

The first is getting your head wrapped properly round the concepts. One book helping you do this is Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors written by an Erlang Guru Joe Armstrong where explains Concurrency Oriented Programming in a very accessible way. It is in fact a Ph.D. thesis, but do not let that scare you. It is by far easier to read, and pleasant into the bargain, than most common text books.

Looking at actual systems normally means that you have to learn too much about the actual language for it too make sense just to evaluate things. For Erlang the documentation provides design methodology and behaviours(Erlang speek for design pattern libraries). This will illustrate the design patterns most commonly used in this setting. And these have proved to be effective in building large scale systems, i.e. millions of lines of code (comparable to a factor 4 to 10 of other languages such as Java) and milloins of concurrent processes running on one machine in distributed clusters of machines. A recent example of a real live system is Facebook Chat.

For the other frameworks I cannot really help you I am afraid.