Announce: Akka 2.0 Pre-release Milestone 1

Ladies and gentlemen, Scalars and hAkkers,

We, the Akka committers, are proud to announce the availability of Akka 2.0 pre-release Milestone 1.

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, the missing features, and also what users really like about Akka, have all informed the new Akka.

In the coming months we will continue to improve Akka 2.0 based on your feedback. We're in the process of developing migration guidelines.

You can read more about this first milestone of Akka 2.0 here: http://blog.typesafe.com/akka-20-pre-release-milestone-1

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-M1 documentation: http://akka.io/docs/akka/2.0-M1

Issue tracker: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/akka/milestones/528841-2-0-m1

What’s coming in the next milestone: https://www.assembla.com/spaces/akka/milestones/752523-2-0-m2

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

And as usual... happy hAkking!