ANNOUNCE: Akka 2.0 pre-release Milestone 4 - the LAST milestone before RC1

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√iktor Ҡlang

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Feb 6, 2012, 11:38:46 AM2/6/12
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Ladies and gentlemen, Scalars and hAkkers,

We, the Akka committers, are proud to announce the availability of Akka 2.0 pre-release Milestone 4 - the last of the Akka 2.0 Milestones.
So we invite you to take it for a spin, it's the next generation of Akka!

The creation of Akka 2.0 has been based on feedback received from users, the good and the bad.
The problems users have had, features missing, and also what users really like about Akka, have all formed the new Akka.



Highlights of Akka 2.0 Milestone 4:

 * 57 tickets closed in 13 days. (447 files changed, 20231 insertions(+), 15202 deletions(-))

 * Docs - Akka now has 337 pages of documentation (vs. 305 in M3) Available both as html and as pdf.

 * Actor
   - Default dispatcher based on new ForkJoinPool destined for Java8, extremely better scalability.
   - ActorPath.fromString - easier creating of ActorPaths
   - Remove FSM Ev()

 * Futures
   - Brand new Java API supporting all operations on Future
   - Future.recoverWith - the "flatMap" of "recover"
   - Future.fallbackTo - the harmonized name of what was previously or/orElse
   - Promise.complete - now throws an IllegalStateException if already completed, use tryComplete for conditional complete
   - Future.andThen - makes it possible to create ordered asynchronous side effects
   - All callbacks are now friendlier to the type inferencer

 * Remote
   - Read timeout tracking now supports read timeouts, write timeouts and both, and can be turned off completely
   - No need to configure nodename anymore

 * Serialization
   - Serialization now supports best-effort lookup of suitable Serializer, see docs for more info

 * Misc
   - Better Android compatibility
   - Lots of minor bugfixes
   - Lots of small performance improvements
   - Reworked class loading strategy to be more unified




Highlights of Akka 2.0 Milestone 3:

 * Almost 90(!) tickets closed in 3 weeks. (505 files changed, 13617 insertions(+), 8636 deletions(-))

 * Docs - Akka now has 305 pages of documentation (vs. 254 in M2) Available both as html and as pdf.

 * Patterns
   - "Ask/?" being moved out to a Pattern" - for Scala add 'import akka.pattern.ask' (which will provide suitable implicit conversions to support nearly the same methods, check with 'import akka.migration.ask' first for deprecations; and for Java use akka.pattern.Patterns.ask().
   - gracefulStop
   - pipeTo

 * Actor
   - Removed timeout from Props
   - Removed FaultHandler from Props
   - Renamed FaultHandler to SupervisorStrategy to be more clear
   - Improved SupervisorStrategy creation and parametrization

* ActorSystem
  - ActorSystemImpl renamed to ExtendedActorSystem for Extensions
  - Now has awaitTermination
  - Can now be configured to only create threads that are daemons

 * TypedActor
   - TypedActorProps that is used with typedActorOf, instead of overloading
   - Possibility to proxy any ActorRef (think Remote etc)
 
 * Futures
   - "orElse" is replaced with "or"
   - "zip" has been added
   - Reduced memory footprint per Future

 * Remote
   - Support for starting up Akka on a randomly chosen port
   - Lots of optimizations

 * Akka STM
   - Now uses ScalaSTM instead of Multiverse directly

 * IOActor
   - Many improvements for 2.0

 * Routers
   - Custom Routers (create your own!)
   - Remote Routers, any Router can now be remote
   - Resizers, replaces the old Actor Pool API, add Resizer to Router to get Actor Pool functionality
   - Resizers, configure them in config file
   - Resizers, also usable from Java, so now there's a Java API for "Actor Pools"

 * ømq
   - This module is now ported from Akka 1.3 for Scala

 * Akka FSM
   - There is now documentation on how to use Akka FSM from Java!

 * Migration
   - We now have a draft of a migration package that will help you from 1.x to 2.0, try it out and give us feedback

And much, much more!




Highlights of Akka 2.0 Milestone 2:

* 70 closed tickets since M1

* More documentation, 254 pages vs 216 for M1
  - Serialization API
  - EventBus API
  - Agents
  - Dead Letters
  - General docs improvements

* More samples (Remoting etc)

* Remoting
  - Remote Death Watch
  - Improved logging
  - Improved performance
  - More configuration options

* Routers
  - Load from config
  - BroadcastRouter

* Decoupled Futures from Dispatchers, use any old ExecutorService or Executor

* Akka now uses Scala STM

* Improved Java APIs

* Many minor improvements, bugfixes and tweaks





Highlights of Akka 2.0 Milestone 1:

* Asynchronous by design - most actor related operations are now asynchronous

* Removing all global state - introducing ActorSystem

* Mandatory Parental Supervision - fault-tolerant default and automatic

* Remote Supervision - children spawned on other nodes are supervised

* Actor Tree Hierarchy - file-system like addressing, with wildcards etc.

* Props - Actor configuration is immutable, sharable and reusable

* Futures & Promises - simpler and more powerful, blocking API refactored out

* Actor Routing - completely revamped, load balancing made much simpler

* Death Watch - react to the death of any actor

* Typed Actors - 0 dependency JDK Proxy based implementation

* EventBus API - publish-subscribe to anything you want

* Extensions - add new functionality to Akka

* Pluggable remote transport layer - Netty/TCP built-in

* General API unification and simplification - less to remember

* Simpler actor life-cycle semantics and management

* Slimmer footprint - around 2.7 million Actors per GB of memory

* Lots of performance and scalability improvements







Akka is released under the Apache V2 license.

Akka website: http://akka.io

Akka Maven repository: http://akka.io/releases

Akka binary distribution: http://akka.io/downloads

Akka 2.0-M4 documentation: http://akka.io/docs/akka/2.0-M4

Issue tracker: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/akka/milestones/937743-2-0-m4

What’s coming in the next release: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/akka/milestones/376049-2-0

Akka mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user




Happy hAkking!




--
Viktor Klang

Akka Tech Lead
Typesafe - The software stack for applications that scale

Twitter: @viktorklang

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