future

A lot of people want to sell Scala as a functional programming (FP) language. That's fine, it certainly is, and FP has many benefits. But when I first started working with Scala I was just looking for a "better Java".

Personally, I grew tired of Java's verbosity. Ruby showed us a different way, and I loved it, but ... after a while I felt like many of my unit tests in Ruby wouldn't be necessary if the language had static types. I wished for a concise Ruby-like language with static types.

While I was working on improving how Sarah gets information from Twitter and other sources, I decided to take some of that code and hack together this example. It shows how to make three Twitter web service requests concurrently -- and then wait for ther results before moving on -- with Akka Futures.

Before sharing the entire class, the cool Akka Futures stuff is in these lines of code:

Akka actor ask FAQ: Can you share an example that shows how one Akka actor can ask another actor for information?

Sure. Here's a quick example to demonstrate how one Akka actor can ask another Akka actor for some information and wait for a reply. When using this "ask" functionality, you can either use the "ask" method, or the "?" operator, and I've shown both approaches below.