Actors and Workflows Part 2: Building a Customer Loyalty Program

This article discusses how to build a customer loyalty program using the Actor Model and Temporal Workflows. The Actor Model requires actors to be able to send and receive messages, create new actors, and maintain state. Temporal differs from other actor frameworks in that it is general-purpose rather than specific to one model or system design pattern. The customer loyalty program example includes a Workflow representing a customer's loyalty status and the ability to send and receive messages, create new Actors, and maintain state. The implementation details vary depending on the language used, but the core concepts remain the same. In this example, customers can earn points by performing certain actions, unlocking rewards as they reach different thresholds. Customers can also invite others to join the loyalty program or gift points or status levels to their guests. The Workflow ensures that messages are received and acted upon, and that the state of each customer's account is maintained accurately. The article provides code examples in Go, Java, and Python for implementing this customer loyalty program using Temporal Workflows. It also discusses handling long-lived customers by using Continue-As-New to reset the Event History when it becomes too large. Additionally, the article covers spawning new customers by creating other Workflows and signaling them with a specific message. Overall, this article demonstrates how Temporal Workflows can be used to build an Actor-based application in a highly distributed, concurrent, and scalable way, making it easier to manage long-running processes and maintain state across multiple instances.