I’m very glad my library can help you teach students important principles in a natural way. The examples you gave sound appealing to me. I’d love to be a student of your courses, I’m sure.
I’ll be very happy to hear how the course goes.
Regarding the professor’s concerns, there are two types of actors in GParallelizer – thread-bound and event-driven ones.

1. The thread-bound actors each have their own thread, which blocks (optionally with a timeout) when calling receive() to obtain a message from an empty queue.

2. The event-driven (pooled) actors share a thread pool and when calling react() they release the thread back to the pool, so in essence these actors don’t block the thread when there’s no message available. The thread can simply do something else.

The send() methods in both types of actors don’t block since an instance of unbounded LinkedBlockingQueue class is used to hold messages by default and the messages are added using its put() method. Only SynchronousActor and BoundedActor, which are types of thread-bound actors, may block since they use SynchronousQueue or bounded ArrayBlockingQueue respectively.

Let me know if there’s more you need to know.

Best regards,

Vaclav

Tan mateix, hi ha dos tipus d’Actors:
”
GParallelizer comes with two types of actors, both of which have their uses. Thread-bound actors maintain their own thread of execution, whereas event-driven actors (as of the 0.6 release) share a common thread pool, from which they borrow threads whenever they must react to an event – typically a message sent to them.
” (http://code.google.com/p/gparallelizer/wiki/Actors)

Respecte blocking/no_blocking, no ho trobo explícitament a la documentació (que de moment és molt “breu”), però hi ha la possibilitat d’establir un onTimeout() quan s’espera un missatge (acció que és bloquejant…).

Vaig veure un exemple de xat (http://dramatis.mischance.net/repositories/entry/dramatis/examples/im) que també dóna molt de jo per aprendre (o podria complementar el del joc d’endevinar un número)…

Sabeu d’altres exemples?

Imagino que en Groovy no hi threads i crees actors que es comuniquem amb missatges per repartir les tasques, no?
Pots triar les característiques del canal de comunicació (blocking/non-blocking,….)

J.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p8epGgK8otyNF1KoxMqD7Xw