Uniquely identifying actors in scala

Question

I'm building a simple logging class in scala which would write all log information to a file. This is part of a homework assignment. Hence I cannot use the already available loggers in java or scala or akka libraries. Can any of you please tell how to uniquely identify actors in scala i.e., is there a resource ID or any other ID for each actor. If so, how can it be accessed?

I tried using hashCode() on the actor objects. But it does not give the expected result, as the value changes for each object and many objects can be created for a single actor.

Answer 1

If you are using akka actors you can get the name of the actor by looking at self.path (self is an ActorRef)

http://doc.akka.io/api/akka/2.0.4/#akka.actor.ActorPath

EDIT:

If you are using scala actors then you could do something like...

class MyActor(name: String) extends Actor { 
  def act() {
    receive {
      case _ => println("Message on actor: " + name)
    }
  } 
}
val actor1 = new MyActor("actor1")
val actor2 = new MyActor("actor2")