Actor model implementation for JavaScript and Node.js (work in progress)

Inspirations: Scala Actors, Akka, Pykka

Actors live in systems, so let's define ours:

var drama = require('drama')
var sys = drama('sys')

Okay, now let's create a simple actor in our system, with some default behavior:

var actor = sys.actor({ hello: function (message) { console.log(message) } })

And then run it!

actor.tell('hello', 'world') // 'world'

Right. Now let's see what else we can do. Maybe we need to put and get some value back and forth from the actor. So let's create an actor that does that:

var actor = sys.actor(function (initial) {
  var value = initial
  return {
    set: function (val) {
      value = val
    }
  , get: function () {
      this.reply(value)
    }
  }
})

Wait, what happened here? We defined an initial behavior as a function. These functions catch all the messages, but we'll only be using the first one to set an initial value and put our var in scope.

We then return or designate a behavior for any message that'll come in the future. return is essentially overloaded to be the react method familiar with other actor implementations. Scala users should read return as react.

So let's initialize it and use it:

actor.init('some value')
actor.ask(actor, 'get', function (val) {
  console.log(val) // 'some value'
})

You probably don't want literals all over your code. Don't worry, you can create a proxy and use it as a regular object:

var proxy = actor.pick('?get', 'set')
proxy.set('another value')
proxy.get(function (val) {
  console.log(val) // 'another value'
})

Here we create a proxy using pick on an actor reference. It essentially allows you to pick methods from the actor. You'll also notice the ? which is used to declare that this method should be invoked with ask rather than tell. There is also a ?? prefix to indicate that the reply is expected to be a future, and that you want to auto-resolve and callback for you. Hopefully, when we get harmony proxies from ES6 everywhere, this step could be omitted.

Just fork the system and use like local:

var remote = sys.fork('remote')
var remoteActor = remote.actor({
  ping: function () { this.reply('pong')
}}).pick('?ping')

remoteActor.ping(function (response) {
  console.log(response) // 'pong'
})

These and a lot more, can be found in the examples/.

Enjoy!

MIT/X11