title: Using Akka to make Web service calls from Play app
body: <p>I am fairly new to programming with the Play framework as well as Akka, although I've been reading about them for a while. I am now starting a proof-of-concept application on the default/basic Play environment. My question stems from the web service client api in Play (http://www.playframework.org/documentation/2.0.1/ScalaWS). </p>
  
  <p>This application basically needs to mediate calls to a remote SOAP web service in as scalable and performant a way as possible. Browser makes ajax calls in JSON, Play app needs to transform them to SOAP/XML and vice versa on the response. </p>
  
  <p>If I used the play web service client directly through the controller, these calls can be asynchronous, which is way better than what we do now (blocking). However, I'm not clear on how this exactly this would behave under heavy load. Will the concurrency/thread-management be largely left to the underlying Netty server? Do I have any way to tune it?</p>
  
  <p>An alternative would be to use an Akka actor system from the controllers, where I can control the routing policy, pool size, fault-tolerance etc. If I take this approach, would it still make sense to use Play's async WS client? If so, would this approach ( of composing Futures?) be the recommended pattern?</p>
  
  <p>Another factor that seems to make the Akka approach more attractive is that this application would eventually have several other responsibilities, so we could control/tune the resources allowed to this ActorSystem and reduce risk of the entire app getting dragged down by the SOAP service.</p>