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Akka vs Spring: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will explore the key differences between Akka and Spring. Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications while Spring is a framework that simplifies the development of Java applications.

  1. Concurrency Model: Akka uses an Actor model for concurrency, where communication between components is asynchronous and message-based. It provides lightweight, isolated actors that communicate through message passing, allowing for better scalability and fault tolerance. On the other hand, Spring uses a thread-based concurrency model, where threads are used to handle requests and execute tasks. This model may scale less efficiently and have more overhead compared to the actor model used in Akka.

  2. Distribution and Fault Tolerance: Akka is designed for distributed systems and provides built-in support for clustering and replication. It allows for transparent distribution of actors across multiple nodes, making it easy to build fault-tolerant systems. Spring, on the other hand, does not have built-in support for distribution and fault tolerance. It relies on other technologies like message brokers or cloud platforms for achieving these capabilities.

  3. Asynchronous communication: Akka encourages asynchronous communication between components, which allows for non-blocking and highly concurrent systems. It provides powerful abstractions like futures and streams for handling asynchronous operations. Spring also supports asynchronous communication, but it relies on traditional approaches like threading or Java's CompletableFuture, which may not be as efficient or scalable as Akka's actor-based model.

  4. Reactive Programming: Akka is designed with reactive principles in mind and provides excellent support for building reactive systems. It allows for better responsiveness, scalability, and resilience in the face of failures. Spring has also embraced reactive programming with the introduction of Spring WebFlux, but it may not have the same level of support and integration for reactive systems as Akka.

  5. Integration: Spring is a full-fledged framework that provides a wide range of features and integrations with other technologies. It has excellent support for database access, dependency injection, web development, and other enterprise features. Akka, on the other hand, focuses more on the interaction between actors and provides less out-of-the-box support for other technologies. It can be used alongside Spring for specific use cases, but it may require more effort to integrate the two frameworks.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Spring has a large and mature community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and third-party libraries. It is widely adopted in the industry and has a vibrant ecosystem. Akka has a smaller community compared to Spring and may not have the same level of documentation and third-party library support. However, it is still widely used in specific domains like distributed systems and has an active community.

In summary, Akka and Spring differ in their concurrency models, distribution and fault tolerance capabilities, asynchronous communication approach, support for reactive programming, level of integration with other technologies, and the size of their communities and ecosystems. Depending on the requirements of the application, developers can choose between Akka's actor model for highly concurrent and distributed systems or Spring's comprehensive framework for building enterprise applications.

Advice on Akka and Spring
Needs advice
on
DjangoDjango
and
SpringSpring

I am a graduate student working as a software engineer in a company. For my personal development, I want to learn web development. I have some experience in Springboot while I was in university. So I want to continue with spring-boot, but I heard about Django. I'm reaching out to the experts here to help me choose a future proof framework. Django or Spring Boot?

Thanks in Advance

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Replies (5)
Recommends
on
SpringSpring

Kamrul Hasan, Don't choose dying technologies with small communities. How many startups do you think use Spring and Django? Use Google Trends to compare technologies. Study the StackOverflow developer survey and job websites to see what technologies are wanted. Few teams can afford to train you to get up to their level so be a life-long learner. Embrace the dawn of a new industry and become an expert.

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Sulaiman Sanusi
Recommends
on
SpringSpring

I recommend you stick to Java Spring as you already have experience with the technology, i suggest you master this technology and then if Django seam to be very interesting to you, django is a framework you can easily pickup as python is also easy, you have to probably be able to manage the context switching between a static typed language like Java to dynamic language like python

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Christoph Becker
Recommends
on
DjangoDjangoSpringSpring

It depends on what you want. Spring is Java-based whereas Django is Python-based. The question rather is Java vs Python. I personally recommend Python as it's shorter and easy to learn. But Java has advantages in really big systems.

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Gonzalo Fernández
Recommends

Hi Kamrul,

It really depends on the kind of project and whether you feel more comfortable with Java or Python. Both are excellent frameworks, with a huge community and learning material. I've been working with Spring Boot since I started coding almost and I can assure you it's the perfect combination for Java. The learning curve may be harder that Django, but once you know the basics you're good to go. I can't tell you much about Django but you must now by now that it has a great reputation with Python users. In any case I don't think you can go wrong with any of these two. My advice is, if you are already familiar with the Spring framework, give Spring Boot a try, because you're going to find out that it just makes the whole Spring experience so much easier. Let us know what you chose!

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Recommends
on
DjangoDjango

Both are in active development and had huge community support. It really depends on you what you are comfortable with. Both are married to their respective languages. I choose Python over Java because of its simplicity and readability. To develop in java you need to write a lot of code. That's how java is. The best part I love with Django is its synchronization with Databases.

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Pros of Akka
Pros of Spring
  • 32
    Great concurrency model
  • 17
    Fast
  • 12
    Actor Library
  • 10
    Open source
  • 7
    Resilient
  • 5
    Message driven
  • 5
    Scalable
  • 230
    Java
  • 157
    Open source
  • 136
    Great community
  • 123
    Very powerful
  • 114
    Enterprise
  • 64
    Lot of great subprojects
  • 60
    Easy setup
  • 44
    Convention , configuration, done
  • 40
    Standard
  • 31
    Love the logic
  • 13
    Good documentation
  • 11
    Dependency injection
  • 11
    Stability
  • 9
    MVC
  • 6
    Easy
  • 3
    Makes the hard stuff fun & the easy stuff automatic
  • 3
    Strong typing
  • 2
    Code maintenance
  • 2
    Best practices
  • 2
    Maven
  • 2
    Great Desgin
  • 2
    Easy Integration with Spring Security
  • 2
    Integrations with most other Java frameworks
  • 1
    Java has more support and more libraries
  • 1
    Supports vast databases
  • 1
    Large ecosystem with seamless integration
  • 1
    OracleDb integration
  • 1
    Live project

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Cons of Akka
Cons of Spring
  • 3
    Mixing futures with Akka tell is difficult
  • 2
    Closing of futures
  • 2
    No type safety
  • 1
    Very difficult to refactor
  • 1
    Typed actors still not stable
  • 15
    Draws you into its own ecosystem and bloat
  • 3
    Verbose configuration
  • 3
    Poor documentation
  • 3
    Java
  • 2
    Java is more verbose language in compare to python

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What is Akka?

Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.

What is Spring?

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

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What companies use Akka?
What companies use Spring?
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