Akka Actor Patterns

Question

I asked a question recently regarding Akka PoisonPill and the excellent answer that I received mentioned an Akka "actor pattern" known as "disposable actors".

Essentially, according to that user, a disposable actor is one that is killed (via PoisonPill) as soon as it is no longer needed, hence releases resources back to the actor system.

I Googled "Akka actor patterns", "Akka disposable actors" and the likes, and found no sign of any collection of known actor patterns.

So I ask: Is this "disposable actor pattern" something that is home grown, or is there in fact a set of known Akka actor patterns? If the latter, where are they documented?

Answer 1

There are some great books out there that explain some useful patterns, for example Akka Concurrency or Effective Akka and soon Akka in Action (plus others). We are currently also writing Reactive Design Patterns which is also highly applicable to actors.

Answer 2

Derek Wyatt, the author of Akka Concurrency, has written an excellent blog entry about "Shutdown Patterns in Akka 2" on Let it crash where he also describes the PosionPill Pattern¹.

¹ Pattern not in a rigorous definition as you might find in Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software by Eric Gamma, et. al.