ANNOUNCE: Akka 2.0 pre-release Milestone 3

Ladies and gentlemen, Scalars and hAkkers,
We, the Akka committers, are proud to announce the availability of Akka 2.0 pre-release Milestone 3.
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.
In the coming weeks we will continue to improve Akka 2.0 based on your feedback.
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, M4 will contain API for Java
 * 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-M3 documentation: http://akka.io/docs/akka/2.0-M3
Issue tracker: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/akka/milestones/851893-2-0-m3
What’s coming in the next milestone: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/akka/milestones/937743-2-0-m4
Akka mailing list: https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user

Happy hAkking!
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