Actor Shell

Actor shells allow socket managers to interface with regular actors. Much like regular actors, actor shells come in two flavors: with dynamic typing (actor_shell) or with static typing (typed_actor_shell).

Actor shells can be embedded into a protocol instance to turn messages on the network to actor messages and vice versa. The primary use case in CAF at the moment is to allow servers to send a request message to an actor and then use the response message to generate an output on the network. Please see examples/http/rest.cpp as a reference for this use case.

Unlike a “regular” actor, an actor shell has no own control loop. Users can define a behavior with set_behavior, but are responsible for embedding the shell into some sort of control loop.

For the full class interface, please refer to the Doxygen documentation.