Part 2: Creating the First Actor

Introduction

With an understanding of actor hierarchy and behavior, the remaining question is how to map the top-level components of our IoT system to actors. The user guardian can be an actor that represents the whole application. In other words, we will have a single top-level actor in our IoT system. The components that create and manage devices and dashboards will be children of this actor. This allows us to refactor the example use case architecture diagram into a tree of actors:

We can define the first actor, the IotSupervisor, with a few lines of code. To start your tutorial application:

1. Create a new IotSupervisor source file in the com.example package.
2. Paste the following code into the new file to define the IotSupervisor.

Scala

copysourcepackage com.example

import akka.actor.typed.Behavior
import akka.actor.typed.PostStop
import akka.actor.typed.Signal
import akka.actor.typed.scaladsl.AbstractBehavior
import akka.actor.typed.scaladsl.ActorContext
import akka.actor.typed.scaladsl.Behaviors

object IotSupervisor {
  def apply(): Behavior[Nothing] =
    Behaviors.setup[Nothing](context => new IotSupervisor(context))
}

class IotSupervisor(context: ActorContext[Nothing]) extends AbstractBehavior[Nothing](context) {
  context.log.info("IoT Application started")

  override def onMessage(msg: Nothing): Behavior[Nothing] = {
    // No need to handle any messages
    Behaviors.unhandled
  }

  override def onSignal: PartialFunction[Signal, Behavior[Nothing]] = {
    case PostStop =>
      context.log.info("IoT Application stopped")
      this
  }
}

Java

copysourcepackage com.example;

import akka.actor.typed.Behavior;
import akka.actor.typed.PostStop;
import akka.actor.typed.javadsl.AbstractBehavior;
import akka.actor.typed.javadsl.ActorContext;
import akka.actor.typed.javadsl.Behaviors;
import akka.actor.typed.javadsl.Receive;

public class IotSupervisor extends AbstractBehavior<Void> {

  public static Behavior<Void> create() {
    return Behaviors.setup(IotSupervisor::new);
  }

  private IotSupervisor(ActorContext<Void> context) {
    super(context);
    context.getLog().info("IoT Application started");
  }

  // No need to handle any messages
  @Override
  public Receive<Void> createReceive() {
    return newReceiveBuilder().onSignal(PostStop.class, signal -> onPostStop()).build();
  }

  private IotSupervisor onPostStop() {
    getContext().getLog().info("IoT Application stopped");
    return this;
  }
}

The code is similar to the actor examples we used in the previous experiments, but notice that instead of println() we use Akka’s built in logging facility via context.logcontext.getLog().

To provide the main entry point that creates the actor system, add the following code to the new IotApp object IotMain class.

Scala

copysourcepackage com.example

import akka.actor.typed.ActorSystem

object IotApp {

  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    // Create ActorSystem and top level supervisor
    ActorSystem[Nothing](IotSupervisor(), "iot-system")
  }

}

Java

copysourcepackage com.example;

import akka.actor.typed.ActorSystem;

public class IotMain {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    // Create ActorSystem and top level supervisor
    ActorSystem.create(IotSupervisor.create(), "iot-system");
  }
}

The application does little, other than log that it is started. But, we have the first actor in place and we are ready to add other actors.

What’s next?

In the following chapters we will grow the application gradually, by:

1. Creating the representation for a device.
2. Creating the device management component.
3. Adding query capabilities to device groups.