research-article

Akka.js: towards a portable actor runtime environment

Authors:

Gianluca Stivan,

Andrea Peruffo,

Philipp HallerAuthors Info & Claims

AGERE! 2015: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

Pages 57 - 64

https://doi.org/10.1145/2824815.2824821

Published: 26 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Multiple mature implementations of the actor model of concurrency exist. Besides several ones available for the Java Virtual Machine, there are others, for example, written in SmallTalk or in C++, targeting native platforms or other virtual machines. Recently, runtime environments for platforms such as GPUs have also appeared. However, so far, no full-featured, distributed actor runtime environment has allowed actor programs to run, unchanged, on both Java and JavaScript virtual machines. This paper describes our ongoing effort in providing a portable implementation of the widely-used Akka actor framework.

References

[1]

AJAX. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/ AJAX.

[2]

Common.js. http://requirejs.org/docs/commonjs. html.

[3]

EcmaScript 6. http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku. php?id=harmony:specification_drafts.

[4]

EcmaScript 6 - Modules. http://wiki.ecmascript.org/ doku.php?id=harmony:modules.

[5]

List of languages that compile to JS. https: //github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/ list-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS.

[6]

Node.js. http://nodejs.org.

[7]

Redmonk programming language rankings: Summer 2015. http://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2015/07/31/ programming-language-rankings-summer-2015/.

[8]

A short history of JavaScript. https://www.w3. org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_ JavaScript.

[9]

Single-page application. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Single-page_application.

[10]

G. A. Agha. ACTORS - a model of concurrent computation in distributed systems. MIT Press, 1990.

Digital Library

[11]

J. Armstrong. Erlang — a survey of the language and its industrial applications. In INAP’96 — The 9th Exhibitions and Symposium on Industrial Applications of Prolog, pages 16–18, Oct. 1996.

[12]

J. Armstrong. Erlang. Commun. ACM, 53(9):68–75, 2010.

Digital Library

[13]

D. Charousset, R. Hiesgen, and T. C. Schmidt. CAF - the C++ actor framework for scalable and resource-efficient applications. In AGERE!@SPLASH, pages 15–28. ACM, 2014.

Digital Library

[14]

S. Doeraene. Scala.js. http://www.scala-js.org/, 2013.

[15]

P. Haller. On the integration of the actor model in mainstream technologies: The Scala perspective. In AGERE!@SPLASH, pages 1–6. ACM, 2012.

Digital Library

[16]

P. Haller and M. Odersky. Scala actors: Unifying thread-based and event-based programming. Theor. Comput. Sci, 410(2- 3):202–220, 2009.

Digital Library

[17]

S. Halloway. Programming Clojure. The Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh, NC, 2009.

Digital Library

[18]

C. Hewitt. Viewing control structures as patterns of passing messages. Artif. Intell, 8(3):323–364, 1977.

Digital Library

[19]

C. A. R. Hoare. Communicating sequential processes. Commun. ACM, 21(8):666–677, 1978.

Digital Library

[20]

T. Lindholm and F. Yellin. The Java Virtual Machine Specification. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, second edition, 2000.

Digital Library

[21]

B. Liskov and L. Shrira. Promises: Linguistic support for efficient asynchronous procedure calls in distributed systems. In PLDI, pages 260–267. ACM, 1988.

Digital Library

[22]

J. Maassen, R. van Nieuwpoort, R. Veldema, H. E. Bal, and A. Plaat. An efficient implementation of Java’s remote method invocation. In PPOPP, pages 173–182, Aug. 1999.

Digital Library

[23]

E. Meijer. Your mouse is a database. Commun. ACM, 55(5):66–73, 2012.

Digital Library

[24]

H. Miller, P. Haller, E. Burmako, and M. Odersky. Instant pickles: generating object-oriented pickler combinators for fast and extensible serialization. In OOPSLA, pages 183–202. ACM, 2013.

Digital Library

[25]

H. Miller, P. Haller, L. Rytz, and M. Odersky. Functional programming for all! Scaling a MOOC for students and professionals alike. In ICSE Companion, pages 256–263. ACM, 2014.

Digital Library

[26]

D. Nolen and contributors. ClojureScript. https://github. com/clojure/clojurescript, 2011.

[27]

M. Odersky and T. Rompf. Unifying functional and objectoriented programming with Scala. Commun. ACM, 57(4):76– 86, 2014.

Digital Library

[28]

D. Ongaro and J. K. Ousterhout. In search of an understandable consensus algorithm. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 305–319. USENIX Association, 2014.

Digital Library

[29]

M. Philippsen, B. Haumacher, and C. Nester. More efficient serialization and RMI for Java. Concurrency - Practice and Experience, 12(7):495–518, 2000.

[30]

Typesafe, Inc. Akka. http://akka.io/, 2009.

Cited By

Babaei MDingel J(2023)Efficient regression testing of distributed real-time reactive systems in the context of model-driven developmentSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-023-01086-522:5(1565-1587)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-023-01086-5
Cazzola WCesarini FTansini L(2022)PerformERL: a performance testing framework for erlangDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-022-00429-735:5(439-454)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-022-00429-7
De Bleser JDi Nucci DDe Roover C(2020)A Delta-Debugging Approach to Assessing the Resilience of Actor Programs through Run-time Test PerturbationsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 1st International Conference on Automation of Software Test10.1145/3387903.3389303(21-30)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387903.3389303
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Akka.js: towards a portable actor runtime environment
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Extra-functional properties
      1. Interoperability

Recommendations

On the integration of the actor model in mainstream technologies: the scala perspective
AGERE! 2012: Proceedings of the 2nd edition on Programming systems, languages and applications based on actors, agents, and decentralized control abstractions

Integrating the actor model into mainstream software platforms is challenging because typical runtime environments, such as the Java Virtual Machine, have been designed for very different concurrency models. Moreover, to enable integration with existing ...
The software architecture for performing scientific computation with the JLAPACK libraries in ScalaLab

Although LAPACK is a powerful library its utilization is difficult. JLAPACK, a Java translation obtained automatically from the Fortran LAPACK sources, retains exactly the same difficult to use interface of LAPACK routines. The MTJ library implements an ...
ScalaLab: An Effective Scala-Based Scientific Programming Environment for Java

Scala offers many benefits for constructing scientific programming environments. Extending Scala with Matlab-like constructs enabled the creation of ScalaSci, a compiled mathematical scripting framework, and ScalaLab, an efficient integrated scientific ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

AGERE! 2015: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

October 2015

64 pages

ISBN:9781450339018

DOI:10.1145/2824815

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 October 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '15

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '15: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 26, 2015

PA, Pittsburgh, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 19 of 35 submissions, 54%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

7
Total Citations
View Citations
202
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 19 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Babaei MDingel J(2023)Efficient regression testing of distributed real-time reactive systems in the context of model-driven developmentSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-023-01086-522:5(1565-1587)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-023-01086-5
Cazzola WCesarini FTansini L(2022)PerformERL: a performance testing framework for erlangDistributed Computing10.1007/s00446-022-00429-735:5(439-454)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-022-00429-7
De Bleser JDi Nucci DDe Roover C(2020)A Delta-Debugging Approach to Assessing the Resilience of Actor Programs through Run-time Test PerturbationsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 1st International Conference on Automation of Software Test10.1145/3387903.3389303(21-30)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387903.3389303
Babaei MBagherzadeh MDingel JSyriani ESahraoui H(2020)Efficient reordering and replay of execution traces of distributed reactive systems in the context of model-driven developmentProceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3365438.3410939(285-296)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3365438.3410939
Myter FScholliers CDe Meuter W(2018)Parallel and Distributed Web Programming with ActorsProgramming with Actors10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_1(3-31)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00302-9_1
Krauweel MJongmans S(2017)Simpler Coordination of JavaScript Web WorkersCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-319-59746-1_3(40-58)Online publication date: 27-May-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59746-1_3
Myter FScholliers CDe Meuter WClebsch SDesell THaller PRicci A(2016)Many spiders make a better web: a unified web-based actor frameworkProceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Programming Based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control10.1145/3001886.3001892(51-60)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3001886.3001892

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents