Actors and Workflows: Different, Yet the Same
Talkat JCON Europe 2023 · on Tuesday, 2023-06-20· at 12:00· Cinema 7, Im Mediapark 1, 50670 Köln, Germany·
summary
Temporal-backed Java workflows implement long-lived Actors that receive signals like addPoints and inviteGuest, create child workflows by deterministic IDs, and persist event history so a Ctrl-C crash and worker restart resumes customers (5000 points → Platinum tier) without replaying logs. Demo shows asynchronous child start, history pruning via continueAsNew, a live IndexOutOfBounds bug that is fixed and retried automatically, and notes on non-determinism/versioning for safe code upgrades.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction to talk
- 2:48Defining actor model
- 5:18Parallelism vs concurrency
- 7:03Actor model benefits
- 9:38Actor state persistence
- 11:45Introducing workflows
- 12:50Customer loyalty demo setup
- 13:31Building customer data object
- 14:15Workflow interface design
- 15:42Running workflow demo
- 17:50Handling system failures
- 18:54Sending messages implementation
- 19:37Creating child workflows
- 24:31Infinite workflow execution
- 26:36Full workflow demonstration
- 28:23Summary of actor workflows
- 29:05Q&A session starts
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