Developing the Futures w/ Actors idea further...

[lukewyman]

Hey @RayRoestenburg - I've been working on understanding Chapter 5 - Futures (hybridized with some Chapter 2 - Up and Running stuff) and came up with something that I like in a portfolio project I'm working on. You can check out my actor that works with Futures here.

• Essentially I made an "orchestrator" actor that coordinates ask(?)'s to several HttpClient actors. Each HttpClient actor hits a microservice and returns a result accordingly. So to checkout after shopping, you'd want to coordinate requests to the payment, inventory, and shoppingcart microservices.
• HttpClient actors return a Future[Either[SomeResponse]]. The Left has an error that captures what might have gone wrong when the HttpClient hit the microservice
• I also borrowed the separate trait idea from BoxOfficeApi from Chapter 2 - Up and Running to abstract away the ask-y future-y stuff, and mixed that into the orchestrator actor
• Future[Either[SomeResponse]] is a hassle, so I used the EitherT monad transformer from cats to make nice flatMapF calls and for comprehensions.
• so I think this is a pattern that brings it all together for a nice, clean way of getting something like this done.
• (I still haven't put in logic to kill the children and self after the request is done, but anyway)

Also, if there's a way I can simplify it down and adapt it to your TicketInfo example, I'd be happy to do a PR on this repo that builds a TicketInfo with calls to client actors that hit the webservices you refer to.

[RayRoestenburg]

Hi Luke,

Sounds like you've been able to build on top of the examples to good use! (The link to your orchestrator actor does not work, so I could not look at the details).

Since these are the examples for the book, I prefer to keep them as is (also saves me from having to explain monad transformers in an updated version of the book ;-) but feel free to publish a more built out version of the example somewhere and refer to that repo to the one here.

Cheers, Ray