Current Issues
According to Hewitt, the Actor model faces issues in computer and communications architecture, concurrent programming languages, and Web Services including the following:
- scalability: the challenge of scaling up concurrency both locally and nonlocally.
- transparency: bridging the chasm between local and nonlocal concurrency. Transparency is currently a controversial issue. Some researchers have advocated a strict separation between local concurrency using concurrent programming languages (e.g. Java and C#) from nonlocal concurrency using SOAP for Web services. Strict separation produces a lack of transparency that causes problems when it is desirable/necessary to change between local and nonlocal access to Web Services (see distributed computing).
- inconsistency: Inconsistency is the norm because all very large knowledge systems about human information system interactions are inconsistent. This inconsistency extends to the documentation and specifications of very large systems (e.g. Microsoft Windows software, etc.), which are internally inconsistent.
Many of the ideas introduced in the Actor model are now also finding application in multi-agent systems for these same reasons . The key difference is that agent systems (in most definitions) impose extra constraints upon the Actors, typically requiring that they make use of commitments and goals.
The Actor model is also being applied to client cloud computing.
Read more about this topic: Actor Model
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