Akka-Java interprocess communication

I have a monolithic Java application (frontend/services) running in Tomcat. I'm trying to come up with a design that will allow me to slowly migrate all the parts of the application as individual tiers to (one or more) Akka actor system(s). As a first redesign, I want to keep the client facing frontend in Tomcat and rewrite some of the middle tier logic in Akka.

I have a couple questions about how to go with this redesign:

• What's the most efficient way for the frontend to communicate with Akka? I was considering REST but I was wondering if there was anything faster;
• How hard is it to reuse the existing JPA/hybernate entity model from within Akka? I am looking for documentation/gotchas.

Thanks

Akka supports remoting, which is actors talking to actors on other systems. You can have actors in your Tomcat app communicate with actors in the services running elsewhere.

Since JPA/Hibernate/JDBC is blocking you should take special care on how you use it in your actor-based apps.