Remote Class Loading For Akka Library

Alen Vrečko (2012) Remote Class Loading For Akka Library. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

The goal of the thesis is to implement Remote Class Loading for the Akka library. Akka library provides actor model of concurrency for the Java Virtual Machine. It provides easy scalability. We can scale the problem by scaling up i.e. using more actors and providing more hardware resources for the JVM. Alternatively we can also scale out by providing more JVMs (on separate machines). By the latter our work helps. Actors and messages are defined in bytecode. When we want to connect our actor system to a remote system we need to manually guarantee that both sistems have the same bytecode available. Our work makes class definitions available without manual intervention. The problem looks simple but there are numerous details that need to be worked out. There are also numerous ways of implementing this functionality. We chose to trigger the remote class loading functionality in the Class Loader. It blocks the executing thread until it receives the class definitions.

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