There was no intention in the tone, sorry if it came across that way. It 
just feels like there is an issue. I will check out the article, thanks.

On Monday, April 3, 2017 at 10:52:05 AM UTC-5, Ryan Tanner wrote:
>
> Leaving aside the tone of this post...
>
> Have you looked at the longer example of the DSL?
>
>
> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka-http/current/scala/http/routing-dsl/index.html#longer-example
>
> It has examples of how to delegate an endpoint's business logic off to 
> actors or futures.
>
> On Sunday, April 2, 2017 at 7:09:32 PM UTC-6, kraythe wrote:
>>
>> I was really excited about akka-http as I would be able to unburden my 
>> code from the baggage of play and handle my server side as a pure akka 
>> actors app but unless I am much mistaken something is dreadfully amiss with 
>> the implementation. 
>>
>> One of the main core features is the actor paradigm and the integration 
>> of a rich actor system. However, the preferred approach to akka-http seems 
>> to be a throwback to one file programming. The main reason it seems this 
>> way is the DSL. Take this example from a tutorial: 
>>
>>  path("bank" / IntNumber) { id =>
>>         get {
>>           complete {
>>             getById(id).map{result =>
>>               if(result.isDefined)
>>                   HttpResponse(entity =write(result.get))
>>               else
>>                 HttpResponse(entity ="This bank does not exist")
>>             }
>>
>>
>>           }
>>         }
>>       }~
>>         path("bank" / "update") {
>>           post {
>>             entity(as[String]) { bankJson =>
>>               complete {
>>                 val bank =parse(bankJson).extract[Bank]
>>                 update(bank).map{result => HttpResponse(entity ="Bank 
>> has  been updated successfully")}
>>               }
>>             }
>>           }
>>         }
>>     }
>>   }
>>
>>
>> Simple enough right? Too me I see the start of an anti-pattern but lets 
>> look further. It gets worse though, quickly,  as shown in the akka-http 
>> documentation here 
>> <http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka-http/10.0.0/scala/http/routing-dsl/index.html#longer-example>.
>>  
>> Still not bothered? The problem is that these examples are shallow and not 
>> rooted in the real world. In the bank application above would be hundreds 
>> of endpoints and each endpoint would have to validate data send by the 
>> user, check to see whether that data correct against the database and a 
>> dozen other things that would alter the nature of the return type to a  bad 
>> request or internal error. The banking app would also have to log the 
>> problems so forensics can be done on malicious users. Just taking one route 
>> "deposit" would be several hundred lines of code INSIDE the route. However, 
>> it seems that there is no way to break off the route, offload it to another 
>> component (such as a Per Request Actor) and then continue the DSL where you 
>> left off. I had the chance to see for an app in another company that was 
>> asking my advice and their route is 12k lines long and at one point nested 
>> 30 levels deep.
>>
>> Now I know what you might say, "But Robert, you can break up the route 
>> into multiple files" which is true but something has to manually 
>> concatenate all of those routes together and they cant be done off of the 
>> main route. once you are in the routes DSL you are stuck there. Sure, you 
>> can call an actor with a future to do a completion but that actor itself 
>> might return data that requires a different kind of completion based upon 
>> certain criteria such as whether the user has had their account suspended. 
>> So if your completions are diverse, how do you break up the route? 
>>
>> Now if someone has answers to these issues I would love to hear them but 
>> after researching I found that basically PRA's are deprecated in favor of a 
>> "convenient" DSL that entraps the user. For my purposes I opted to go with 
>> the low level API and factor off the route dispatching to a routing actor 
>> (yes, I know this is what the materializer does) and then just pull out 
>> route data the old fashioned way. My router,  does path checking and then 
>> dispatches to another actor to handle that specific request and then sends 
>> the HttpResponse entity back to the sender which completes the ask and the 
>> route. My startup looks like this: 
>>
>>   val serverSource: Source[Http.IncomingConnection, Future[Http.
>> ServerBinding]] =
>>     Http().bind(interface = "localhost", port = 8080)
>>   log.info("Server online at http://localhost:8080";)
>>   val bindingFuture: Future[Http.ServerBinding] =
>>     serverSource.to(Sink.foreach { connection => // foreach materializes 
>> the source
>>       import akka.pattern.ask
>>       println("Accepted new connection from " + connection.remoteAddress)
>>       connection.handleWithAsyncHandler(request => (httpRouter ? request
>> ).mapTo[HttpResponse], parallelism = 4)
>>     }).run()
>>
>>
>> A snippet of the router looks like this. 
>>
>> class HttpRequestRouter extends Actor {
>>   protected val log = Logging(context.system, this)
>>
>>
>>   override def receive: Receive = {
>>     case request: HttpRequest =>
>>       val requestId = UUID.randomUUID()
>>       request match {
>>          case HttpRequest(GET, Uri.Path("/"), _, _, _) =>
>>           notFound(requestId, request) // todo Implement this
>>         case HttpRequest(POST, Uri.Path("/hello"), _, _, _) =>
>>           invokeActor(classOf[HelloActor], requestId, request)
>>         case HttpRequest(GET, Uri.Path("/users"), _, _, _) =>
>>           invokeActor(classOf[ListUsersActor], requestId, request)
>>         case HttpRequest(GET, Uri.Path("/addUser"), _, _, _) =>
>>           invokeActor(classOf[AddUserActor], requestId, request)
>>          case uri =>
>>           notFound(requestId, request)
>>       }
>>     case msg => log.warning("Received unknown message: {}", msg)
>>   }
>>
>>
>>   private def invokeActor(actorType: Class[_], requestId: UUID, request: 
>> HttpRequest) = {
>>     context.actorOf(Props(actorType, sender(), requestId, request), 
>> requestId.toString)
>>   }}
>>
>> This allows me to fork off PRAs as needed but it kind of stinks in one 
>> way because there are a lot of tools in the DSL for unpacking entities and 
>> so on that I cant use, or rather if there is a way I and neither I nor 
>> anyone within the reach of google has figured it out. 
>>
>> So what am I missing? Do people really love this monstrous DSL even 
>> though in a 100 endpoint system the thing will be gargantuan? Is there a 
>> means to fork off at any point in the DSL and then "reboot the stream"? It 
>> would be nice if some of the DSL tools could be invoked arbitrarily inside 
>> the PRAs on the request object like. 
>> class OrderPRA(replyTo: ActorRef, requestId: UUID, request: HttpRequest) 
>> {
>>
>>   // ... code
>>   sender.tell(withRequest(request) {
>>     entity(as[Order]) { order =>
>>             complete {
>>               // ... write order to DB
>>               "Order received"
>>             }
>>           }
>>   }), self)
>> }
>>
>>
>> Opinions? Thoughts?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

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>>>>>>>>>> http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/additional/faq.html
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