Akka is an open source, event-driven middleware project. It is designed to allow developers to write simpler, correct concurrent applications using Actors, STM (software transactional memory) and transactors. I recently talked with Jonas Bonér, co-founder of Typesafe, and creator of Akka.
Wong: You created the Akka Middleware, can you give us a bit of history on Akka and how you came to develop the platform?
Bonér: Sure. I have been working in the industry for more than 10 years. I was a core technical contributor at Terracotta, working on JVM-level clustering technology and at BEA, as part of the JRockit JVM team. I’ve spent a lot of time building middleware systems for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), trying to solve the same things we are solving with Akka now.
About 5-6 years ago I got really interested in Erlang. Erlang is programming language, but it’s not just a language, it’s a completely different platform than the JVM. I got really excited about it. Later I was doing consulting in the high availability (HA) and scalability area and I found Erlang to be an excellent platform for that.
But there was a big problem - almost all my clients and friends was using the JVM or other languages on the Java platform. I knew it would be a really big challenge to get people to switch. But, I felt that HA and, to a greater extent scalability, were too good to be left to the Erlang folks alone. I wanted to implement these excellent concepts on the JVM, so I created Akka.
Around that time, I started a new startup called Triental where we did a portfolio management system for private banking with some features such as stock trend analysis and simulation. There was a great need for many of the things that you can achieve with Erlang, so Akka grew out of that to a large extent. The startup went out of business after awhile, but the ideas stayed with me and I rewrote them into the first release of Akka. That was about 3 years ago, and the first release of Akka was about two years ago.
Wong: If asked to describe Akka in one sentence, what would that sentence be?
Bonér: Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault tolerant event-driven applications on the JVM.