John Lindal’s Blog

Erlang Message Passing — Part 2

I just finished a major overhaul of my Erlang Actor in Java library. Not only does it now provide three different threading strategies (persistent thread, transient thread, thread pool), but these strategies are pluggable. Implementations derive from Actor and implement act(), and the threading strategy is provided when the Actor is instantiated, by passing in a concrete implementation of Agent. I also added in the concept of a MessageSpy, for logging and monitoring. Any number of MessageSpies can be installed, and each one gets to look at every message that is sent.