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Akka VS Netty

Compare Akka VS Netty and see what are their differences

Akka logo Akka

Build powerful reactive, concurrent, and distributed applications in Java and Scala

Netty logo Netty

Cloud-based real estate management solution
  • Akka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-25
  • Netty Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-23

Akka features and specs

  • Scalability
    Akka is designed to handle high concurrency and provides excellent scalability by leveraging the actor model, enabling developers to build distributed systems that can efficiently scale up or out across multiple nodes.
  • Resilience
    Akka promotes building systems that are resilient to failures, using features like supervision strategies and self-healing, to automatically recover from errors and maintain system stability and uptime.
  • Concurrency
    By using the actor model, Akka facilitates easier handling of concurrency, allowing developers to work with asynchronous and non-blocking message-driven communication that reduces complexities associated with multithreaded programming.
  • Flexibility
    Akka integrates with a broad ecosystem of tools and technologies and can be easily used with various JVM-based languages such as Scala and Java, providing flexibility in designing and implementing solutions.
  • Event-driven Architecture
    Akka supports building reactive, event-driven applications, which are responsive, maintainable, and adaptable to changing demands and requirements.

Possible disadvantages of Akka

  • Steep Learning Curve
    The actor model and the associated paradigms in Akka present a steep learning curve for developers who are accustomed to traditional object-oriented or procedural programming models.
  • Debugging Complexity
    Debugging in an actor-based system can be more challenging compared to traditional systems, due to the asynchronous nature of message passing and lack of a global state.
  • Overhead
    There can be additional overhead associated with context switching and message passing between actors, which might impact performance in scenarios with extremely high-frequency messaging.
  • Integration Challenges
    Integrating Akka with existing systems or libraries that are not designed for an actor-based model can pose challenges, requiring developers to adapt or wrap existing codebases.
  • Tooling and Ecosystem
    While the Akka ecosystem is growing, it still lacks the extensive tooling support found in more traditional frameworks, making certain tasks like monitoring and tracing more cumbersome.

Netty features and specs

  • High Performance
    Netty is designed to be highly performant and scalable. It uses non-blocking I/O, which allows it to handle a large number of connections simultaneously with minimal resource consumption.
  • Flexibility
    Netty is highly customizable. You can easily tailor it to specific requirements by adding, removing, or modifying various handlers in the pipeline.
  • Rich Feature Set
    Netty comes with a rich set of features including support for various protocols, advanced threading models, and a comprehensive library for network programming.
  • Strong Community and Documentation
    Netty has a strong and active community. There are ample resources, including comprehensive documentation and numerous examples, to help developers get started.
  • Cross-Platform
    Netty is Java-based, making it cross-platform and portable. This allows it to be used in a variety of environments without needing specific platform adaptations.

Possible disadvantages of Netty

  • Complexity
    Netty's flexibility and feature-rich nature come with a steep learning curve. Understanding and mastering the API can be challenging, especially for beginners.
  • Memory Management
    High-performance applications with Netty require careful memory management. Improper handling can lead to issues like memory leaks or excessive garbage collection.
  • Manual Configuration
    Netty requires a fair amount of manual configuration, which can increase development time. Developers must set up pipelines, handle threading models, and manage other configurations.
  • Limited Out-of-the-Box Functionality
    While Netty is highly customizable, it doesn't provide much out-of-the-box functionality. Developers often need to build a lot of infrastructure to meet their specific needs.
  • Dependency Management
    Netty's extensive feature set means that it comes with a number of dependencies. Managing these can sometimes be a hassle, especially in larger projects.

Analysis of Netty

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Netty is a good choice for building scalable and high-performance network applications. Its ability to handle thousands of concurrent connections efficiently and its rich feature set makes it well-suited for various types of network services.

Why this product is good

  • Netty is considered a robust and efficient non-blocking I/O client-server framework that is widely used for developing network applications. It is praised for its performance, scalability, and support for various protocols such as HTTP, WebSocket, and more. Netty's architecture is designed to handle a large number of connections efficiently, making it suitable for high-performance applications. It also provides a strong abstraction layer, which simplifies the development process of complex network applications.

Recommended for

  • Developers building high-performance network systems
  • Applications requiring non-blocking I/O
  • Projects that need to handle a large number of concurrent connections
  • Development of custom communication protocols
  • Scalable real-time applications

Akka videos

Hults Bruk Akka Forester Axe Review Gransfors Small Forest Axe Killer!?!

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  • Review - Revathi akka review world famous lover || FILM CITY

Netty videos

"Netty - The async event-driven network application framework" by Norman Maurer

More videos:

  • Review - Netty Beauty Life : Bag Review "Best Millie" By Veraparisbag เธฃเธตเธงเธดเธงเธเธฃเธฐเน€เธ›เน‹เธฒเธเธฑเธ™เธ„เนˆเธฐ
  • Review - Netty Bird Cosmetics Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Akka and Netty)
Monitoring Tools
76 76%
24% 24
Web Frameworks
0 0%
100% 100
Data Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Web And Application Servers

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Akka and Netty

Akka Reviews

Top 15 Kafka Alternatives Popular In 2021
There are products like Akka Serverless and Akka Platform by Lightbend that can support business-driven applications. Akka is more of a set of libraries to design resilient systems spanning across networks. It helps developers in saving time over writing low-level code and instead, makes them focus on aligning to business objectives.

Netty Reviews

We have no reviews of Netty yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Netty might be a bit more popular than Akka. We know about 30 links to it since March 2021 and only 21 links to Akka. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Akka mentions (21)

  • Modern Async Primitives on iOS, Android, and the Web
    Kotlin also has a construct for asynchronous collections/streams. Kotlin's version of AsyncSequence is called a Flow. Just as Swift's AsyncSequence builds upon prior experience with RxSwift and Combine, Kotlin's Flow APIs build upon earlier stream/collection APIs in the JVM ecosystem: Java's RxJava, Java8 Streams, Project Reactor, and Scala's Akka. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • What are the current hot topics in type theory and static analysis?
    First-class distributed and multicore computing. Swift has first-class โ€œactorsโ€ and โ€œdistributedโ€ methods. Unison, Erlang, and Elixir are built with distributed being one of the #1 concerns. Though first-class is not super common and I don't really expect it to be because usually libraries are enough (e.g. Scala has Akka and is used WIDELY for distributed); whereas something like linear types and typed effects,... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Anything close beam/otp for other languages?
    Akka is a library that implements the actor model for JVM languages. Mainly in Scala, but you can use it in Java too, and maybe others. It doesn't feel as ergonomic as Elixir, but if Elixir is too "out there" for the decision makers in your case, this might be a friendlier alternative. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Kalix: Move to the Cloud. Extend to the Edge. Go Beyond.
    Kalix builds on the lessons we have learned from more than a decade of building Akka (leveraging the actor model) and our experience helping large (and small) enterprises move to the cloud and use it in the most time, cost, and resource-efficient way possible. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • About Elixir and the microservices architecture
    Note Akka, the Java & friends framework, is working with the actor model and have as main inspiration Erlang to mimic some features of the BEAM on top of the JVM. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
View more

Netty mentions (30)

  • New scalable, fault-tolerant, and efficient open-source MQTT broker
    We use Netty (https://netty.io/) as the source of the MQTT communication, and we build the MQTT features the MQTT broker should support ourselves on top of that. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Modern Async Primitives on iOS, Android, and the Web
    In this space, we also have the somewhat related term blocking. Java's NIO library is one well-known non-blocking tool used for managing multiple tasks on a single Java thread. When listening to sockets, most of the time a thread is just blocked, doing nothing until it receives some data. So, it's efficient to use a single thread for monitoring many sockets, to increase the likelihood of the thread having some... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Lessons learned from picking a Java driver for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis - Part 2
    Given the fact that Lettuce is built with Netty, we also immediately noticed quite an impact on the initialization time (cold start) of our lambda function. Netty is really fast while executing, but takes a bit of time to initialize. The new Lambda Snapstart functionality might help with that. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • what does this error mean
    Io.netty or netty.io is a Java network library, so it does stuff with servers (Minecraft's multiplayer, Chrome websites, local programs talking with each other etc.). Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to invite friends in java?
    If you're still determined, I'll give you two options: 1. Sockets: A simple but primitive way of transferring and receiving data. Everything has to be done synchronously. 2. Netty: A much more robust and flexible asynchronous networking library, but requires much more boilerplate to get started. Source: almost 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Akka and Netty, you can also consider the following products

Dapr - Application and Data, Build, Test, Deploy, and Microservices Tools

Project Reactor - Project Reactor home

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

RxJS - Reactive Extensions for Javascript

Jitterbit - Jitterbit is an open source integration software that helps businesses connect applications, data and systems.

Apache Tomcat - An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies