Actor Concurrency

As the number of cores in our servers increase, concurrent programming continues to rise in importance. Most concurrent programming today focuses on shared memory and concurrency control via locking. However, an alternative paradigm called actor-based concurrency has been rising in visibility with languages like Erlang and Scala. We'll look at how actor-based concurrency differs from shared memory programming and how it can be utilized in languages like Erlang, Scala, and Java.

This talk will look at:

• Trends in hardware
• The problems with shared state concurrency
• What is actor concurrency?
• Erlang as the primary example of actor concurrency
• Actor success stories
• Scala as an alternative
• Java frameworks providing an alternative
• Kilim
• Actor Foundry
• Jetlang
• Actor's Guild
• Pros and cons vs shared state concurrency

About Alex Miller

Alex Miller is a Sr. Engineer with Terracotta Inc, the makers of the open-source Java clustering product Terracotta. Prior to Terracotta, Alex worked at BEA Systems on the AquaLogic product line and was Chief Architect at MetaMatrix. His interests include Java, concurrency, distributed systems, query languages, and software design. Alex enjoys writing his blog at http://tech.puredanger.com and has spoken at a number of Java user group meetings and conferences.

In St. Louis, Alex is responsible for founding the Lambda Lounge, a user group for the study of functional and dynamic languages.

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