Scala Tag

There are applications that execute such complex tasks that if they didn’t use a concurrent processing model, they would be so slow as to be unusable. This group of applications includes data analytics, real-time games and recommendation systems.

Even with modern programming languages that support concurrency, we are faced with the task of coordinating multiple threads, handling synchronisation and the constant possibility of race conditions. These make it difficult to write, test and maintain code, discouraging many developers from implementing better and faster solutions for their problems.

multithreading

In this blog entry we are going to take a quick look at the Akka toolkit, its main concepts and some code examples in Java. For further information about this topic, please check the official documentation at http://akka.io/

multiple-seats

My work commute

My commute to and from work on the train is on average 17 minutes. It's the usual uneventful affair, where the majority of people pass the time by surfing their mobile devices, catching a few Zs, or by reading a book. I'm one of those people who like to check in with family & friends on my phone, and see what they have been up to back home in Europe, while I've been snug as a bug in my bed. Stay with me here folks. But aside from getting up to speed with the latest events from back home, I also like to catch up on the latest tech news, and in particular what's been happening in the rapidly evolving cloud area. And this week, one news item in my AppyGeek feed immediately jumped off the screen at me. Google have launched yet another game-changing product into their cloud platform big data suite. It's called Cloud Dataproc.

play_full_color

It’s an established trend in the modern software world that if you want to get something done, you'll probably need to put together a web service to get do it. People expect data and services to be available everywhere, in a mobile world. With the plethora of frameworks and technologies available to go about implementing a web service, it becomes a chore to try using anything beyond what's already familiar. But every now and then it’s an enjoyable experience to dive into something new and distinctly unfamiliar.