What is the best way to work with akka from nodejs

Question

I have an application interface implemented on angularjs + nodejs + express + socket.io. There is also a function in a separate service. This service is written in akka.

Here's what the entire communication pipeline looks like:

[user enters value] → [angularjs receives the value and sends it to the nodejs server via socket.io] → [nodejs receives the value and direct it to akka] → [akka does some calculations and returns the answer] → [nodejs receives the answer and directs it to angularapp] ,

One possible solution would be to implement the MQ middleware and use it for interoperability, but this message-based approach seems to be overhead for something that clearly looks like an RPC call. What is the best way to create this type of connection between nodejs and akka?

Answer 1

Since Akka says HTTP itself , you can just call RESTful from Node to the Akka service. Pipeline support is supported, so you can make it very efficient. In the Akka HTTP server stream, you use a request template to get the calculated value from your actor.

Answer 2

The cleanest way is to skip node.js / socket.io for the messaging layer and use websockets on top of spray.io . The cafeafe types have an activator template only for the websockets script for acc-accs: Spray and Websocket interfaces for participants

Otherwise, you'll be looking for some kind of RPC middleware, maybe Thrift or ZeroMQ .