Akka 2.4.0 Released

Heya, hAkkers! We're excited to announce the next, newest, shiniest release of Akka, with improved documentation and all sorts of nifty new features! Check out this blog post about key features by Patrik Nordwall, and watch the full webinar with Konrad Malawski. If you're immersed in all things Akka, take a dive into the release notes. Or, if you're new to the Akkaverse, read Why Akka, then jump in and get involved!

The key features of the 2.4.0 release are:

• the “write” side of Akka Persistence was promoted to a fully supported module (not experimental)
• we added experimental stream based API for the Query Side of Akka Persistence
• we promoted the ClusterSingleton, ClusterClient, DistributedPubSub and ClusterSharding patterns to fully a supported Cluster Tools module, including various API and configuration improvements
• we added the experimental Akka Typed module, a new way of formulating Actor interactions with full type-system support (currently Scala only)
• we added experimental Akka Distributed Data, which is useful for sharing eventually consistent data (CRDTs) between nodes in an Akka Cluster
• but the biggest feature is probably that Akka 2.4 is binary backwards compatible with Akka 2.3, which implies that Akka Streams & HTTP as well as Play Framework 2.4 can be combined with Akka 2.4

This major update paves the road for the addition of Streams & HTTP later this year as well as the overhaul of our Java APIs to make use of Java 8 features and facilities—for this reason we require a Java 8 runtime environment from this point onwards.

Thank you to the thriving Akka community! Akka 2.4 is the work of 134 unique committers. 

Learn more about Akka from the source. Also, read our Akka blogs and watch our Akka webinars.