Actor Continuation Passing: Efficient and Extensible Request Routing for Event-Driven Architectures

Abstract

The logic for handling of application requests to a staged, event-driven architecture is often distributed over different portions of the source code. This complicates changing and understanding the flow of events in the system. The article presents an approach that extracts request handling logic from regular stage functionality into a set of request scripts. These scripts are executed step-wise by sending continuations that encapsulate their request's current execution state to stages for local processing and optional forwarding of follow-up continuations. A new internal domain specific language (DSL) that aims to simplify writing of request scripts is described along with its implementation for the scala actors library. Evaluation results indicate that request handling with actor continuations performs about equally or better compared to using separate stages for request handling logic for scripts of at least 3 sequential steps.