Experimental clustering comes to Akka 2.1

The developers of the toolkit for developing concurrent, distributed event-driven applications in Java or Scala, Akka, have announced the release of Akka 2.1 which adds experimental cluster support to the toolkit.

The cluster support is labelled experimental because, despite extensive testing, the developers expect feedback from users will make changes to the API necessary. The clustering system will become official in Akka 2.2, codenamed "Coltrane", and will provide a peer-to-peer decentralised cluster with no single points of failiure and a PubSub event bus carrying gossip about node status. The clustering also allows Akka actors to be moved around the cluster's nodes. Further details of the clustering system are available in the Cluster Specification.

Other new features of Akka 2.1 include integration with the Scala standard library which will see akka-actor.jar become part of the Scala distribution, support for Apache Camel and for Akka remoting using SSL/TLS for greater security. Camel support had previously existed but required a complete rewrite for Akka 2.1. Enhancements include the addition of OSGi meta-information for most Akka bundles, more concise actor declarations with a new ActorDSL, a multi-node testing module and a Java API for the Akka TestKit.

Other changes have been highlighted in recent blog posts on the Akka team blog over the last few months. Akka 2.1 is available to download from the Akka web site and is published under the Apache 2.0 licence.

(djwm)