Jonas Bonér announce the much anticipated release of Akka V1.0 [1] at Jfokus in Stockholm [2]. Akka [3] is an opensource Scala project that gives developers a simpler programming model to develop highly reliable applications for concurrent or parallel operation. Using the popular Actor model as a basis, Akka extends the concept to provide high availability and fault tolerance.
Akka contains high performance components that allow you to simply carry out safe concurrent operations in an application. Software Transactional Memory(STM), for example, has been combined with Actors to provide Transactional Actors giving you an elegantly way to specify such things as message flow, automatic retry and rollback. Akka has many advanced features that enable reliable concurrent systems to be developed faster.
Early Akka adopters seem to be satisfied. Raymond Roestenburg at CSC says "The Akka Actor model has simplified a lot of concerns in the type of systems that we build and is now part of our reference architecture." While Ross McDonald at Thatcham says “We have been in production for over 18 months with zero downtime. The core is rock solid, never a problem, performance is great, integration capabilities are diverse and ever growing, and the toolkit is just a pleasure to work with."
If you are developing systems that require reliabilty, concurrancy, scalability and a faster development cycle Akka maybe just the thing for you.
Links:
[1] http://groups.google.com/group/akka-user/browse_thread/thread/c9a055d6f7d1b4d4
[2] http://www.jfokus.se/jfokus/page.jsp?lang=en&id=vschema#wed
[3] http://akka.io/