CODEWITHSUNDEEP
akka-httplagom
Tilak
Tilak

Reputation: 373

Akka http vs Lagom

Please help in understanding
1)Choosing Akka http vs Lagom for building a microservice
2)Is there any difference between REST API and Akka http/Lagom based microservice.

Thanks

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3254

Answers (1)

lutzh
lutzh

Reputation: 4965

This is a very broad question, but let me give you some pointers.

1) Akka is a library (or, as the Akka team calls it, a toolkit), while Lagom is a framework. What's the difference? To quote Martin Fowler:

A library is essentially a set of functions that you can call, these days usually organized into classes. [..]

A framework embodies some abstract design, with more behavior built in.

Akka gives you everything you need to write a reactive microservice if you know what you're doing. Lagom tells you, to some extend, how to write a reactive microservice. For example it prescribes a certain project structure, and provides ready-made implementations for common patterns in microservices, such as service lookup, circuit breakers, asynchronous messaging, and even event sourcing and CQRS. You can do all this with Akka as well (in fact, that's what Lagom uses underneath), but you'll end up implementing a lot if it yourself. If you're not very experienced with Akka (and you probably aren't, otherwise you wouldn't be asking the question), I would recommend you give Lagom a shot.

2) A microservice is an application that is concerned with one business capability, and interacts with other microservices to form a functional system. REST is an architectural style for accessing and manipulating resources. These are completely independent, you can do microservices without REST, and REST without microservices. But you can also combine them, i.e. build your microservice as a REST service. This, or more specifically REST over HTTP and using JSON, is very common for public-facing microservices that don't only interact with other microservices, but are called from web front-ends or arbitrary client applications. So yes, there is a difference, in fact they have nothing to do with each other, but you can use Lagom (or Akka HTTP) to build a REST API.

Upvotes: 22

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