Akka 0.6 is released

A new release of Akka 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 and a Java API.

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 but also many of the users on the mailing list. Thank you all. Download Akka 0.6 here.

The full release notes are available here, 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 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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