I am struggling to find any decent links to design patterns, best practice or good, basic architectural principles that should be used in building Actor-based apps. Those few that I know of are:
Blog posts, articles, WIKIs, guides
- OTP Design Principles User's Guide
- Patterns and Best Practices for Enterprise Integration (in general, can be applied to any message-driven architecture)
- Series of posts by James Iry on dealing with state in design with actors
- Series of posts on design with Scala actors by Ittay Dror
- Concurrency patterns article on wikipedia
- Scalable System Design Patterns (not directly related to actors, but quite useful)
- Understanding actor concurrency, pt.1, pt.2 by Alex Miller
Papers
- Disseration on making reliable distributed systems by Joe Armstrong
- Scalabale Component Abstractions by Martin Odersky
- Event-based programming without inversion of control by Martin Odersky
- Actors with Multi-Headed Message Receive Patterns by Martin Odersky
Books
- Actors In Scala by Philipp Haller and Frank Sommers
- Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong
Implementations
- Akka Framework (alternative implementation of actors in Scala with a port of several Erlang behaviors and lots of other relized patterns for actors)
- Scalaz Actors (actor compositions, strategies and promises)
Examples from highscalability.com
- Simple queuing service (SQS) - this service provides an internet scale queuing service for storing messages. Distributed actors put work on the queue and take work off the queue. Typical use: a centralized work queue. You put jobs on the queue and different actors can pop work of the queue and process them when they get CPU time. Part of scalability. Have any number of producers and consumers. You don't worry about it. Queues are spread across multiple machines and multiple data centers.