Right now I'm looking at Play Framework and like it a lot. One of the parts heavy advertised amongst the features offered in Play is Akka.
In order to better understand Akka and how to use it properly, can you tell me what are the alternatives in other languages or products?
How does RabbitMQ compare to it? Is there a lot of overlap? Is it practical using them together? IN what use cases?
The best place to start is a great Akka official documentation. I think the closest product/framework to Akka is erlang language. I guess (I haven't used Play framework) Akka is used there to implement Comet and other asynchronous processing.
rabbitmq is somewhat similar in ideas (infrastructure for sending messages), note that RabbitMQ is even written in erlang, but they have slightly different use-cases. I would say that while RabbitMQ focuses on message passing, Akka is more about actors (message receivers and senders).