The Actor model is a simple yet powerful abstraction for developing systems for parallelism and concurrency. Actors are entities that process messages received asynchronously. Akka is an open-source implementation of the Actor model that aims to be "the platform for the next generation event-driven, scalable and fault-tolerant architectures on the JVM." Akka actors can be very lightweight and many thousands can created within a single JVM. They can also be started on remote servers allowing scalability across machines.

Akka incorporates ideas from other technologies like Erlang and Clojure to provide features including fault-tolerance using supervisor hierarchies and Software Transactional Memory. Though Akka is written in Scala, it is designed to be useful to any JVM language.

Akka is part of the technology stack offered by Typesafe, a new company announced on May 12th, 2011. Typesafe is a joint venture between the creators of Akka and Scala with an advisory board that includes James Gosling (creator of Java) and concurrency expert, Doug Lea.

Tim Dalton is a Senior Software Engineer with Object Computing Inc. (OCI). Tim has worked for or contracted with companies around St. Louis including MasterCard, A.G. Edwards, Boeing, Express Scripts, Monsanto and Wells Fargo.