Message passing for actors and humans with Raxx

Elixir, and Erlang, implement an elegant model of message passing. This is their secret sauce for managing concurrency.

HTTP is the primary means of communicating between clients and servers, and often between servers and other servers, it is a protocol for message passing.

Raxx is an Elixir toolkit that treats HTTP interactions as just another kind of message. These external messages are handled in a way completely analagous to internal messages between processes.

This talk will start with an explanation of the core concepts and getting started with Raxx.

Extending message passing to all parts of a system provides a uniform model to describe it.

This talk will explore how to use this model to reason about interactions in an extended web application, from server to browser to human.

OBJECTIVES

Attendee will learn some basics about Elixir and it's web tools (10-15 min).

They will also learn about the Actor model and issues relating to its use, such as:

- at least/most once delivery
- request/response patterns
- race-conditions

TARGET AUDIENCE

Anyone interested in developing non trivial distributed systems