by Andrew Glover
Concurrent programming is central to Java™ development 2.0, but probably not thread-based concurrency. Andrew Glover explains why actors trump threads for concurrent programming in multicore systems. He then introduces Kilim, an actor-based message-passing framework that weaves together concurrent and distributed programming.

Debugging nondeterministic defects in multithreaded applications has to be one of the most painful and frustrating activities known to software developers. So, like a lot of people, I’ve been caught up in the excitement about concurrent programming with functional languages like Erlang and Scala. Both Scala and Erlang employ the actor model, rather than threads, for concurrent programming. Innovations around the actor model aren’t limited to just languages; the actor model is also accessible on Java-based actor frameworks like Kilim. Kilim’s approach to the actor model is intuitive, and as you’ll soon see, the library makes building concurrent applications a breeze.

Full Story