Refactoring retrospective

Throughout the previous chapters, we chipped away at the issues outlined in Chapter 1, Building a Better Reactive App, in an effort to build a more scalable and flexible set of application components. With each successive refactoring, which involved a new tool from the Akka platform, we helped improve the scalability profile of the bookstore app. The main goal was to end up with independent service components, which was finally achieved in Chapter 9, Managing Deployments with ConductR, with the introduction of ConductR. With our work now complete, it makes sense to go over what we did in each chapter, and how that contributed to the final set of components that we have now.

Coding better actors

The work we did in Chapter 2, Simplifying Concurrent Programming with Actors, wasn't directly related to solving scalability concerns, but it was important nonetheless. In this chapter, you learned how to identify poorly coded actors, ones that were too dependent on nested...