Actor basic operations

In this section, we will discuss some of the useful and frequently used Akka Actor operations. In the Akka Toolkit, an Actor can perform the following operations:

• Create an Actor
• Send messages
• Receive messages
• Stop an Actor
• Become/unbecoming an Actor
• Supervise an Actor

Let's define a simple Actor to explore all these operations, one by one, in the following sections.

Defining an Actor

Before creating an Actor and performing its operations, we need to define it.

In the Akka Toolkit, we can define an Actor class by extending the Actor Trait and providing implementation for the receive method, as follows:

class SampleActor extends Actor { 
  def receive: Receive = { 
    //Implmentation 
  } 
} 

Here's the description:

• Here, Actor is a trait available in the akka.actor package
• The Actor trait has an abstract method—receive
• The receive () function is a Scala Partial Function
• It takes a type of Any and returns Unit
• Its complete signature  is this:

      def receive: PartialFunction[Any,Unit...