ANN: Akka 1.1 is released

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Jonas Bonér

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May 12, 2011, 9:59:05 AM5/12/11
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Dear Hakkers.

We are proud to announce Akka 1.1

What is Akka?

Akka is the platform for the next generation event-driven, scalable and fault-tolerant architectures on the JVM.

Akka implements a unique hybrid of:

  • Actors, which gives you:
    • Simple and high-level abstractions for concurrency and parallelism.
    • Asynchronous, non-blocking and highly performant event-driven programming model.
    • Very lightweight event-driven threads (create ~13 million actors on 8 G RAM).
  • High-availability through supervisor hierarchies with let-it-crash semantics. Excellent for writing highly fault-tolerant systems that never stop, systems that self-heal.
  • Software Transactional Memory (STM). (Distributed transactions coming soon).
  • Transactors: combine actors and STM into transactional actors. Allows you to compose atomic message flows with automatic retry and rollback.
  • Remote actors: highly performant distributed actors with remote supervision and error management.
  • Agents & Dataflow Concurrency
  • Java and Scala API.

What’s new in 1.1?

Here is a list of the most major new features since 1.0.

  • Moved all documentation to reStructuredText, much more slick and intuitive
  • Updated to Scala 2.9.0
  • akka-actor now has 0 external dependencies
  • Much fewer dependencies in total for the akka modules
  • Dataflow API for Futures using delimited continuations so you can write seemingly blocking code that will not block runtime
  • Futures are now fully Monadic which means that they are ready for for-comprehension goodness
  • Futures now have lots of non-blocking methods allowing composition of Futures without blocking
  • Futures can now be executed natively on all the Dispatchers
  • Lot's of fixes have gone into akka-remote including tuning and hardening
  • Priority actor mailboxes
  • Generic EventHandler for Akka internal and user code asynchronous events with pluggable listeners, SLF4J listener available
  • TestKit module for testing actor-based applications
  • Improved Java API
  • Lot's of performance enhancements and bug fixes

Read the full release notes.

Read the migration guide.

Read the new getting started guide

Read the new akka documentation.

Read the new akka modules documentation.

Where can I get it? 

Download Akka & Akka Modules: http://akka.io/downloads/

Check out the source: https://github.com/jboner/akka/tree/v1.1

https://github.com/jboner/akka-modules/tree/v1.1

Typesafe Stack

Akka 1.1 is also available in a simple, pre-integrated stack with Scala 2.9.0.final from Typesafe at: http://typesafe.com/stack. Typesafe also provides training, support for, and commercial products on top of, Akka and Scala. 

Where is Akka used? 

Akka is deployed in production at numerous companies in many different areas:

  • Finance/Banking
  • Betting/Gaming
  • Telecom
  • Simulation
  • Television/Media
  • eCommerce
  • Social Media sites 

Common theme across all these industries are systems that are highly transactional, needs high throughput, low latency and carrier-grade availability (5 nines or more).

What is Akka used for?

  • Transaction Processing Systems
  • Reliable Services Systems 
  • Enterprise Integration Platform
  • EDA - CQRS, Event Sourcing
  • Complex Event Stream Processing
  • Simulation
  • Grid Computing
  • Analysis of large datasets
  • Batch Processing
Enjoy. 

- Akka Team
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