Network I/O for a More Civilized Age: The New Akka I/O

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This talk will explore the benefits and power of this new Akka I/O layer, including a brief exploration of its benefits over the "Old" Akka IO. The presenter will introduce the ByteString & it's powerful manipulation tools for network traffic, the Pipeline system for composed protocol decoding, and much more.

Until recently, users seeking a way of doing Scalable I/O had two choices: NIO, which provides an esoteric interface requiring serious expertise and concurrency control, or Netty - which provides a rich and powerful layer above NIO. The downsides to Netty however include an extremely idiomatic Java API, and a series of separated threads and thread pools left out of the control of the user.

There is, however, hope for the Scala user who abhors free range threading and wants a more Scala-sane interface to a network. Working with the Spray has recently introduced a new, lightweight Non-blockimg network I/O interface built around Akka's core Actors.

Further insights will include a demonstration of Akka I/O's built in system for Backpressure — allowing true handling & awareness of an overloaded network buffer, and compositing of Futures on top of the Actor API to emulate a more functional interface.

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