Folks, For a while I've been thinking about integrating Akka (http://akkasource.org/) into ESME. Akka is a library for concurrency, fault-tolerance and remoting and actors are one of its most important components. The advantages of using Akka are:
1. Easy remoting- it's trivial to make an actor remote (http://doc.akkasource.org/remote-actors-java). This might help with federation/clustering in the future. 2. Akka has nice Camel integration (http://doc.akkasource.org/camel). Camel has a lot of endpoint components, which are conspicuously similar in intent to our actions: (http://camel.apache.org/components.html). If we replace our actions with Camel components, we will have a ready DSL for dozens of actions at little extra effort. For instance, XMPP support is supposed to become trivial (at least at first glance). The upside is that it should be fairly ealy to replace Lift actors with Akka actors where (and if) needed. The downside is having another library dependency- but we also won't need to implement and maintain all the different action types. What do you think? I will let you know how this idea matures and how my research goes. Vassil
