Getting data into an actor system...

[davidrpugh]

@bherd-rb based on out discussion yesterday I started looking at the docs for the IO module in Akka. Looks like this would be the module that we would want to use to get data from the outside world into some Actor's mailbox for processing.

Getting the GPS coordinates for a particular IoT device and loading them into a TradingActor might be a reasonable use case that would serve both our purposes. Car looking for a parking spot would have GPS coords that would need to be efficiently loaded into a TradingActor (parking meter would also have GPS coords that would need to be loaded into an AuctionActor); similarly a smart house would need to load its GPS coordinates into its TradingActor.

Thoughts?

[bherd-rb]

@davidrpugh That looks really cool! I think this is exactly what we need. Do I understand it correctly that any external component (e.g. a physical device) only needs to make itself known to the manager in order for a specialised agent (e.g. a TradingAgent) to be created which then, for all subsequent messages from the physical device, will act as the actor counterpart? In other words, is the centralised manager only used for the initial connection attempt or does all communication always need to pass through it?

[davidrpugh]

@bherd-rb I think this is correct. I think the manager just handles the IO infrastructure, whilst individual RequestHandler actors process requests concurrently. No communication bottlenecks as far I understand it.

Here is another template project that has some more details. At a glance, this project would seem to show some examples of the functionality we need.