Eventually everything, and actors

I tweeted a little while ago about the appeal of 'eventual' everything; eventually persisted, eventually synchronised etc etc. I am still of a mind that this is a good thing, it lets cross cutting concerns be handled in a truly elegant way, especially when coupled with the actor paradigm.

In recent days at work we have been tasked with architecting a new logging / auditing module for our platform, and we had to jump through the usual hoops in thinking out a solution. We have what is often called a kernel, and many (surely to grow in number) satellite modules. Some persist to a relational store, some to a search index, some to a post relational store. As per usual we need to be able to audit actions on any of these, with clearly defined verbs dictating what is possible within our system. We need to think of the usual CRUD operations, and also 'preview' and 'publish' operations.

We immediately thought about the possibility of 'eventually' logging / auditing, as in our case there is no need for real time reporting on logged / audited information. Additionally, by decoupling auditing / logging to an even greater extent than using aspects, by using actors, we can keep our codebase simple and elegant, letting a hive of workers do our work for us, in a scalable way with redundancy built in whether it is on one machine or across many.

A further advantage is that completely independently from the code which fires auditing or logging operations we can model in a simple real world way the kind of delegation required to perform all these many tasks which need to occur in our platform. We simply abstract our auditing 'messages' conveniently handled by Scala's case classes, and fire them at a worker or set of workers who know how to handle them, and can choose how they want to persist them. No need to wrap unpleasant aspects across the multiple projects which comprise our ever growing platform.

We are betting on actors in a big way, and this paradigm is delivering in solving real world problems in an elegant way. Right now there are several actor implementations, with more in the pipeline. For us Akka provides a massive number of integration possibilities, and great performance.