Asterism :: JRuby Concurrency with Akka

Description

Asterism provides a Ruby friendly wrapper for the Akka library. Thus, it only runs on the Java Virtual Machine using JRuby.

Akka Homepage

Examples

Software Transactional Memory

r = ref(1)
atomically do
    r.alter {|val| val + 1 }
end

Asynchronous Tasks

t = task do
    puts 'Look ma, another thread'
    42
end
t.run
t.get    #=> 42

Setup

The setup for Asterism is a little difficult. This is because it requires many Java artifacts, which must be installed using bleeding-edge tools. This will hopefully improve.

First, you must download and install Maven 3

Then install the gemify-maven-plugin:

git clone git://github.com/mkristian/jruby-maven-plugins.git
cd jruby-maven-plugins
mvn install

With the plugin installed, you can now "gemify" the Akka libraries (note that I'm using version 0.27.0-SNAPHOT of the plugin. If version 0.27.0 has been push to (repo1)[http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/de/saumya/mojo/gemify-maven-plugin/] then this process will be less painful - but these steps won't be quite right for the time being):

mvn de.saumya.mojo:gemify-maven-plugin:0.27.0-SNAPSHOT:gemify -Dgemify.gemname=mvn:se.scalablesolutions.akka:akka-stm -Dgemify.repositories=http://akka.io/repository -Dgemify.version=1.0.0

This will get all the necessary dependencies for building and running Asterism, and turn them into gems. The gems will be put in the target directory. So now run:

gem install target/*.gem

You can expect some errors, because many of these gems depend on each other - and the gem is installing them in no particular order. Just install the ones it missed manually.

Next, you need to get my patched version of Bundler and install it:

git clone git://github.com/jkutner/bundler.git
cd bundler
git checkout master
rake install

Now, clone the Asterism project and run Bundler with the --local option (so that it gets the gems from your GEM_HOME instead of from http://akka.io/repository/):

git clone git://github.com/jkutner/asterism.git 
cd asterism
bundle install --local

Finally, build the Asterism gem and install it:

rake gem
gem install pkg/asterism-0.1.gem

TODO

• Configure the log level of logback - its noisey at DEBUG
• Make Actors easier to use

Version

0.1

Release Notes