TL;DR I reimplemented an old school-assignment simulating Ladybugs with Akka, Websockets and Spray.io. Check here for how it ended up.

Once when studying at KTH we had a programming assignment consisting of building an application where Ladybugs would wander around on the screen living their life.

The hard part of that assignment was that each ladybug must be represented by its own thread which should handle all operations concerning the ladybug that it represented, including drawing to the screen. This exercise was mainly about learning to program correctly in the realms of multi-threading and the exercise was set to be done in C++ targeting the Win32 API.

This video shows the original application running.

I remember spending quite a lot of time on this assignment, not only on the programming part but also on the graphics side where I put some extra effort modelling and animating the ladybugs in 3D-studio. The year must have been 1999. Sweet nostalgia, heh..

Ever since taking the Coursera course Principles of Reactive Programming I’ve had the idea of reimplementing this old school assignment using Akka where each ladybug would be represented by its own Actor.

My idea for the end result was to display the ladybugs wandering around in a web-browser updating the current state in real-time through a Websocket.

One quite big problem though was the fact that the original source code got lost somehow and the only remains of it was an executable file. Not much to do about that then to reimplement the logic, but I managed to dig out the original bitmaps from it which was nice.

This project has now been in brewing for quite a while. Below the actual end result should be displayed.

All these ladybugs are wandering around aimlessly and aging in the process, eventually time will run out for them.
They can also be killed by shift-clicking on them with the mouse.
The two colours represent different genders and under certain circumstances where two genders meet reproduction is possible. If this happens some eggs will be laid which will eventually become ladybug children.
Stones can be placed to obstruct the path for the ladybugs by clicking with the mouse somewhere at the grass and then removed again by clicking on the stone.
Also new ladybugs can be spawned by ctrl-clicking somewhere on the grass. There’s a upper limit of 100 of them though.

Some statistics are gathered and showed in the bottom. Notice the “other ws connections” which tells how many other browsers are connected at the same time except yours.

Doing this in Akka and Scala was really fun exercise with the help of Spray and the nice Spray-websocket project.

Compared to the original code doing this one was a bit more complex since lots of more parts and techniques are involved like Akka, Websockets, Frontend, etc. But compared to the old C++ based code where concurrency issues easily could sneak in and critical sections had to be be employed using the Actor and message passing approach feels much nicer.

One quite big difference is that this new implementation is more interactive in the sense that multiple clients will interact with the same server-side state. So what you see in the browser is what other visitors will see and the interactions that you do will affect others.

How well this scales in term of multiple visitors is a bit unclear. This is run on a free Heroku dyno which may be resource limited and the Websocket support on Heroku might be limited too.

For anyone interested the source code for this is available here: https://github.com/bwestlin/akka-actor-ladybugs.