Supervise Any Non-Child Actor?

Question

This requirement may sound weird or may be I am not sure how to solve this problem, I am giving my best shot here to explain with following diagram

• I have an existing application (Legacy Application) which runs as single process.
• Legacy Application has very old dependencies on java version, slf4j, spring etc.
• In order to make it fault-tolerant and add some supervision to it I wrapped it inside an Akka Actor and start remotely in different JVM and Actor System.
• I start this legacy app from my new application as

processor = context.actorOf(Props[Processor], "processor")

and my configuration looks like

deployment {
      /newApplication/processor/ {
        remote = "akka.tcp://[email protected]:2552"
      }

But since Processor has all old dependencies, I get them in my new system as well :(

What I am looking for?
- Is there a way I can start the legacy application inside ActorSystem(and JVM) where it can be encapsulated but have supervisor in the new Application?

bottom-line: I want to have old dependencies not leak out, but since the other JVM can throw OOM, I would like to supervise from outside (new ActorSystem)

Answer 1

About dependencies, just use Group Router, which sends messages via ActorSelection and don't require presence of target classes at senders side. But presence of Actors at this paths not managed by Group Router. More details at: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4-M2/scala/remoting.html

akka.actor.deployment {
  /parent/remoteGroup {
    router = round-robin-group
      routees.paths = [
        "akka.tcp://[email protected]:2552/user/workers/w1", 
        "akka.tcp://[email protected]:2552/user/workers/w1",
        "akka.tcp://[email protected]:2552/user/workers/w1"]
      }
}

About supervising: Just resolve ActorSelection (resolveOne method call) from paths (which used in the Group Router) and add ActorRef objects to context.watch of the actor in your new application then handle Terminated messages.