Akka VS Play

Kotlin also has a construct for asynchronous collections/streams. Kotlin's version of AsyncSequence is called a Flow. Just as Swift's AsyncSequence builds upon prior experience with RxSwift and Combine, Kotlin's Flow APIs build upon earlier stream/collection APIs in the JVM ecosystem: Java's RxJava, Java8 Streams, Project Reactor, and Scala's Akka.

First-class distributed and multicore computing. Swift has first-class “actors” and “distributed” methods. Unison, Erlang, and Elixir are built with distributed being one of the #1 concerns. Though first-class is not super common and I don't really expect it to be because usually libraries are enough (e.g. Scala has Akka and is used WIDELY for distributed); whereas something like linear types and typed effects, you can't emulate in a library.

Akka is a library that implements the actor model for JVM languages. Mainly in Scala, but you can use it in Java too, and maybe others. It doesn't feel as ergonomic as Elixir, but if Elixir is too "out there" for the decision makers in your case, this might be a friendlier alternative.

Kalix builds on the lessons we have learned from more than a decade of building Akka (leveraging the actor model) and our experience helping large (and small) enterprises move to the cloud and use it in the most time, cost, and resource-efficient way possible.

Note Akka, the Java & friends framework, is working with the actor model and have as main inspiration Erlang to mimic some features of the BEAM on top of the JVM.

Looking back at real dates, I started learning the language (Scala) back in 2008 because it was something new and trendy that interested me. I started spending some serious time with it in 2009 (helping out other newcomers and making small contributions to various projects), and then in 2010 became a core contributor to the Akka project (you can find me a little ways down this list: https://github.com/akka/akka/graphs/contributors). For the most part I worked on the features I wanted to, but worked on other things if a user asked nicely. Akka became very popular in the early 2010s, so all of a sudden I had highly sought after skills. Got hired by a London based company and moved myself and my family from Canada over here. But even today, that exposure I got 10 years ago still helps me to land new contracts.

In the open source world, Akka, the most popular actor system library in the JVM ecosystem, that’s heavily used in tonnes of open source projects, recently went from “free and open source” to “paid/proprietary and source available.” https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561

Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from.

Lightbend, the company owning Akka, recently shared a blog post signed by the CEO announcing a license change from Apache 2.0 to Business Source License 1.1, a proprietary license. You can already find it in this PR, merged a couple days ago.

Akka 2.6 is on the open source Apache license, that is unchanged (its not possible for Lightbend to change an existing license). Its only the new Akka 2.7 which has the BSL license, so as long as you don't upgrade you are fine. See https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561.

My major complain here is that, as far as being a web framework there is precious little information here about the framework. How does this framework scale with multiple requests? What concurrency strategy is it using (threads, processes, actors, etc?). Is this opinionated (it doesn't seem so but it also doesn't say it isn't either). How does this work with popular libraries x,y,z. The full docs have a little bit more information, but not a ton. But mostly there are some cute toy examples and "built in python" and thats about it.

Lets compare this with for example play https://www.playframework.com/ I know from this that it built on Akka, its stateless, aims for predictable resource consumption, has non-blocking io, etc. There is a ton of really important information on what does this web framework actually do that is really important when you are making a choice of a framework.

I have no idea how good this framework is, but besides a few toy examples, I can't see anything that makes me thing "wow this is great I need to use this".

A web application framework for Java/Scala: https://www.playframework.com/

Scala 3 migration isn't as simple as migrating other apps, you can track the work at https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11260

And there are frameworks you can use to make development easier, like Play. And Java has plenty of choices for dependency injection frameworks.

However do note, Play should be perfectly usable as well, and it's still maintained by the community: https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11649

In university I learned a bit of Java, so maybe I could use it professionally I guess?. There were many options to choose from. DropWizard, Spark, Play Framework. But the more documented one in the internet I found was Springboot, besides there were some courses in spanish and some friends that knew something about Springboot, so I give it a chance.

For a backend web server I use Play - https://www.playframework.com/ which I find to be the easiest one as a backend web server. For learning/using spark I found this course from coursera to be very useful. https://www.coursera.org/learn/scala-spark-big-data