What is the best way to implement a request/response protocol using akka and scala?

Question

I've been studying about how I could develop a distributed architecture that implements the protocol request/response using the concept of concurrency through actors.

I concluded that the best way to do this is by creating a response system with synchronous handling of Futures/Promises, and soon after the response, leaving an open channel to receive notifications.

Thus an architecture that would work exactly like a inbox message.

It has some problems.

Thus I would have to maintain two endpoints (actors in the two layers)?

The Problem: The view module requests that a particular element is processed. She sends this command to be processed via RemoteActor on the application server. This server should immediately return the promise that it will notify you when the element is processed. After this, the view module will be waiting the notification of completion of processing.

How do you see this problem?

I am using Scala, Akka and Google Guice.

I believe it is a generic problem that everyone can make use of their solutions. Excuse me if I'm hurting the terms of stackoverflow site.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I don't want to distract from any good answers you may get on Akka, because I unfortunately don't know much about Akka and it's distributed actors features, but I'd like to ask if you've considered any alternatives.

It seems that you basically need an asynchronous RPC library. There are two powerful libraries written in Scala that I know of that may satisfy your requirements - http://sna-projects.com/norbert/ and http://twitter.github.com/finagle/. Finagle gives some really powerful combinators for expressing asynchronous computation dependencies and registering listeners on futures. I'm currently maintaining Norbert, which we use at LinkedIn for some of our distributed systems, such as search.