Another Word For It

Where Akka Came From

From the post:

Sparked by the recent work on an Akka article on wikipedia, Jonas, Viktor and Yours Truly sat down to think back to the early days and how it all came about (I was merely an intrigued listener for the most part). While work on the article is ongoing, we thought it would be instructive to share a list of references to papers, talks and concepts which influenced the design—made Akka what it is today and what still is to come.

As you already know, I have a real weakness for source documentation, both ancient as well as more recent.

Enjoy!

Akka 2.1.0 Released

From the post:

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to be able to announce the availability of Akka 2.1.0 ‘Mingus’. We are proud to include the work of 17 external committers, plus the work done by our great community in reporting and helping to diagnose bugs along the way.

This release refines and builds upon version 2.0, which was published a bit over nine months ago. The most prominent new features are

• cluster support (experimental, including cluster membership logic & death watch and cluster-aware routers, see more below)
• integration with Scala standard library (SIP-14 Futures, dataflow as add-on module, akka-actor.jar will be part of the Scala distribution)
• Akka Camel support (Raymond Roestenburg & Piotr Gabryanczyk)
• Encrypted Akka Remoting using SSL/TLS (Peter Badenhorst)
• OSGi meta-information for most bundles (excluding samples and tests, Gert Vanthienen)
• an ActorDSL for more concise actor declarations, e.g. in the REPL
• a module for multi-node testing (to support you in developing clustered applications, experimental in the same sense as cluster support)
• a Java API for the TestKit

In addition there have been a great number of small fixes and improvements, documentation updates (including a whole new section on message delivery guarantees), an area for contributions—akka-contrib—where community developments can mature and prove themselves and many more. A series of blog posts high-lighting the new features has been published over the past weeks on this blog, see this tag.

Looking forward to exploring the new features in this release!

Akka website

Akka downloads

I first saw this at This week in #Scala (04/01/2013) by Chris Cundill.

Akka

From the webpage:

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

We believe that writing correct concurrent, fault-tolerant and scalable applications is too hard. Most of the time it’s because we are using the wrong tools and the wrong level of abstraction.

Akka is here to change that.

Using the Actor Model together with Software Transactional Memory we raise the abstraction level and provide a better platform to build correct concurrent and scalable applications.

For fault-tolerance we adopt the “Let it crash” / “Embrace failure” model which have been used with great success in the telecom industry to build applications that self-heal, systems that never stop.

Actors also provides the abstraction for transparent distribution and the basis for truly scalable and fault-tolerant applications.

Akka is Open Source and available under the Apache 2 License.

I am increasingly convinced that “we are using the wrong tools and the wrong level of abstraction.”

Everyone seems to agree on that part. Where they differ is on the right tool and right level of abstraction.

I suspect the disagreement isn’t going away. But I mention Akka in case it seems like the right tool and right level of abstraction to you.

I would be mindful that the marketplace for non-concurrent, not so scalable semantic applications is quite large. Think of it this way, someone has the be the “Office” of semantic applications. May as well be you. Leave the high-end, difficult stuff to others.