What are the language and product alternatives to Akka?

Question

Right now I\'m looking at Play Framework and like it a lot. One of the parts heavy advertised amongst the features offered in Play is Akka.

In order to better understand

Answer 1

The best advice I can offer, as I also went through the same thought process when Play 2.0 joined Typesafe and started to use Akka more, is to search for "Actor model".

Wikipedia is a great resource - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model. It has a list of programming languages that can support the actor model, and also has a list of frameworks (including Akka) that are based on the Actor model.

Put simply, the Actor model is based around the concept of actors in a concurrent computation model. Actors doesn't necessarily mean passing of messages, but most common use cases will have actors passing messages (which is where the similarities with rabbitMQ will come in).