Akka 0.6 is released

A new release of Akka [1] is available. Akka is an Actors-based framework that, in the author's words, enables "Simpler Scalability, Fault-Tolerance, Concurrency & Remoting through Actors". Akka has both a Scala API [2] and a Java API [3].

Jonas Bonér writes: I am proud to announce the release of Akka 0.6. It is a major release in many ways. Many people have made this happen. Especially the great team [4] but also many of the users on the mailing list. Thank you all. Download Akka 0.6 here [5].

The full release notes are available here [6], but here is a summary of the highlights:

• New STM impl with a declarative, a high-order fun and a monadic API
• New persistence module backends; Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB, works with STM
• Much improved performance; Akka is now 2-3 times faster than Scala Actors (both event and thread-based) in shootout [7] benchmark.
• Much improved memory footprint; an Actor consumes ~600 bytes, can now create 6.5 million on 4 G RAM
• Much improved Remote Actors; reconnect, compression, implicit sender, supervision across nodes etc.
• Comet bindings for Actors
• REST bindings for Actors
• Cluster Membership protocol; nodes find each other automatically, simple API
• Security module; HTTP digest and Kerberos
• Many new Serializers; SBinary, JSON, Protobuf etc.
• AMQP integration
• Lift integration
• Spring integration (in progress)
• Guice integration
• Microkernel

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