Colossus Background Task - scala

Question

I am building an application using Tumblr's new Colossus framework (http://tumblr.github.io/colossus/). There is still limited documentation on it (and the fact that I'm still very new to Akka doesn't help), so I was wondering if someone could chime in on whether my approach is correct.
The application is simple and consists of two key components:
A thin web service layer that will queue tasks into Redis
A background worker which will poll the same Redis instance for available tasks and process them as they become available
I made a simple example to demonstrate that my concurrency model will work (and it does), which I posted below. However, I would like to make sure that there is not a more idiomatic way to do this.
import colossus.IOSystem
import colossus.protocols.http.Http
import colossus.protocols.http.HttpMethod.Get
import colossus.protocols.http.UrlParsing._
import colossus.service.{Callback, Service}
import colossus.task.Task
object QueueProcessor {
implicit val io = IOSystem() // Create separate IOSystem for worker
Task { ctx =>
while(true) {
// Below code is for testing purposes only. This is where the Redis loop will live, and will use a blocking call to get the next available task
Thread.sleep(5000)
println("task iteration")
}
}
def ping = println("starting") // Method to launch this processor
}
object Main extends App {
implicit val io = IOSystem() // Primary IOSystem for the web service
QueueProcessor.ping // Launch worker
Service.serve[Http]("app", 8080) { ctx =>
ctx.handle { conn =>
conn.become {
case req#Get on Root => Callback.successful(req.ok("Here"))
// The methods to add tasks to the queue will live here
}
}
}
}
I tested the above model and it works. The background loop continues running while the service happily accepts requests. But, I think that there might be a better way to do this with workers (nothing found in documentation), or perhaps Akka Streams?

Answer 1

I got it working with something that seems semi-idiomatic to me. However, new answers & feedback are still welcomed!
class Processor extends Actor {
import scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.Implicits.global
override def receive = {
case "start" => self ! "next"
case "next" => {
Future {
blocking {
// Blocking call here to wait on Redis (BRPOP/BLPOP)
self ! "next"
}
}
}
}
}
object Main extends App {
implicit val io = IOSystem()
val processor = io.actorSystem.actorOf(Props[Processor])
processor ! "start"
Service.serve[Http]("app", 8080) { ctx =>
ctx.handle { conn =>
conn.become {
// Queue here
case req#Get on Root => Callback.successful(req.ok("Here\n"))
}
}
}
}