Actor Framework Basics Article

[QueueYueue]

I put together a series of articles while working on an AF 101 presentation for our local CLD summit. Check them out and let me know what you think or if you have any questions/improvements.

• Part 1 – The Background
• Part 2 – The Actor
• Part 3 – Launching and Communicating
• Part 4 – Being Productive With Actors
• Basic Walkthrough – Creating a Logger

[dhakkan]

Hello,

 

First off, kudos on the effort!

 

I did a quick read-up. Overall, a great write-up! Parts 3, 4 and the walkthrough were the most helpful for me (as one who has been struggling to appreciate this implementation of AF). The introduction in Part 1 was also great; however, I got confused by the last paragraph. Will read it again with a clearer head.

 

Cheers,

[jacobson]

Great series of articles. I appreciate how you took a lot of time to explain where all of the actions are really taking place, like helpers and good methods to override. I haven't taken the time to really investigate AF (I really need to know OOP better first) but other documents I read went so far into the messaging that I could never figure out how you were supposed to do anything once the message reached its destination.

 

-Matt J

 

P.S. small writing mistake in part 4 in "Doing Work in Messages vs in the Helper Loop where you say, "The helper loop would then start working through he file."

[Jordan Kuehn]

Excellent intro presentation.  I attended one of the earlier AF sessions at NI week in 2010 (I think) and came away with a good impression of it and it's power, but an article like this would have saved me a lot of time picking up the basics.  A good follow on topic could be taking the pyramid structure of Actors shown in Part 3 and digging into that a bit and effective communication techniques between parts of the system.  Some focus on messages and routing perhaps.

[Rainer Langlitz]

I would vote this as the definitive guide for Actor framework introduction.