Programming the Cloud with Actors: Inside ActorFx
Description
ActorFx is an MSOpenTech open source project with the goal of providing a non-prescriptive, language-independent model of dynamic distributed objects. This will in turn provide a framework and infrastructure on top of which highly available data structures and other logical entities can be implemented.
ActorFx (aka Ax) is based on the idea of the Actor Model developed by Carl Hewitt. Erik Meijer figured this model would fit perfectly into the realm of managing data in the cloud. See his paper on the topic, which is the basis for the ActorFx project. You can learn more about the Actor Model in this Channel9 video with Carl and Erik.
Here, the lead developers of ActorFx - Brian Grunkemeyer and Joe Hoag - join us to dig into some of the details of the technology. We also discuss the potential of Actors in the cloud, the problems they solve, how you program with them on the client (CloudList<T> is an interesting "cloud-enabled" type, for example), and potential applications of this approach to scalable distributed computing.
United States
