Again, Java vs. Scala is a different question than akka or no akka. Java vs Scala is in the end a question of ease of use, and of adding a stronger Scala side to the project (for our own sake or for attracting interested developers).
Akka is planned not simply as an rpc replacement alone, but for remote calls, asynchronous callbacks, failure detection, master failover, and a simpler concurrency model in the execution graph. I Actually think that the current rpc is limiting us, for example because of the lack of callback support, which makes the polling parts necessary. Stephan
