"One benefit of Summer was that each day we had more light to read by." The wonderful quote by American author, Jeannette Walls beautifully expresses what summertime was all about for me when I was in school. Summer break was finally there and there's nothing to worry about for a couple of weeks before we had to start over again. Growing older with less vacations than my daughters have today, I still enjoy this time of the year to catch up on reading. And there's a lot to learn because of our awesome community which never stops contributing.

This technical whitepaper helps architects and technology leaders understand the business impact of modernizing with the actor model to build Reactive systems--systems that are purpose-built for the modern era of multicore cloud computing.

In this Lightbend podcast, we sit down with special guest Jan Machacek, CTO of Cake Solutions, conference speaker, and author of the upcoming O’Reilly book, Reactive Systems Architecture: Designing And Implementing An Entire Distributed System.

I am Summer, come to lure you away from your computer ... and we all deserve the upcoming break. But this doesn't stop us or our community to create amazing new content and give you some summer time reading. A big thank you to our community for creating so much amazing content sharing the knowledge on how to use Reactive technologies in the right ways.

With Akka Streams providing the "glue" between both microservices and the real-time analysis performed in the Fast Data space, we wanted to shine the spotlight on three industry leaders in their respective markets–PayPal, Credit Karma, and Flipkart–collectively worth well over $50 billion in market capitalization...

Today's Lightbend Podcast is with special guest Colin Breck, a longtime Akka user that has been creating some excellent technical content on his personal blog lately. Today we're here to talk about Akka Streams and Akka Actors, two very important modules for building resilient streaming, distributed systems with the overall Akka toolkit.

We’re excited to announce that, in the interest of clarity, consistency and expandability, we are renaming our acclaimed technical training courses...

In this technical white paper, we review the tricky, unavoidable nature of network partitions, and describe what kind of strategies are needed resolve split brain scenarios intelligently, in just seconds.

With Scala Days just behind us and summer holidays ahead of us, we're gearing up for hot weather with plenty of new releases, events, and community driven articles...

In this webinar, Lightbend’s Senior Product Director, Craig Blitz reviews five early challenges enterprises face when building streaming and Fast Data systems, what to consider and how Lightbend aims to make these choices more straightforward with our upcoming Fast Data Platform.

Throughout our experiences with hundreds of clients, we’ve seen that our most successful customers have been able to truly accelerate their progress with any new technology if they take the journey with a guide from Lightbend...

With April swooshing by, we're a step closer to the warmer months again. Time to check how the communities have been working on Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala and which surprises you may have missed in April.

This article takes a deeper look at how three traditional, brick-and-mortar style businesses–Norwegian Cruise Lines, Swisscom and UniCredit Group–crossed the chasm into Fast Data with technologies, support and services from Lightbend.

In this webinar, Dustin Lyons, Engineering Manager at Credit Karma, discusses how his team migrated away from PHP and successfully implemented Akka Streams with Apache Kafka to ingest, process and route real-time events throughout their data ecosystem.

Lightbend and Datadog are excited to announce the official Datadog integration for Akka, enabling Datadog users building Akka-based Reactive applications to gain real-time insights into their applications for ensuring the health, availability and performance of their systems.

In this new white paper, we outline the functions a modern monitoring solution must perform in order to truly benefit from the advantages promised by Fast Data and streaming applications.

In this podcast with Patrik Nordwall, Akka Tech Lead at Lightbend, we review what’s new and improved in Akka 2.5 and what your teams should know in order to get the most out this release.

Now that summer is approaching, it's a good time to check out the latest developments in the Akka, Scala, Play and Lagom communities. With many conferences last month and even more amazing blog posts, our new tech digest gives you a solid overview on what you may have missed last month.

In this Lightbend webinar, we present what to look for in an effective monitoring solution for streaming and Fast Data applications, including a demo of Lightbend Monitoring using sample scenarios to show how we can help your team not just in production, but also during development to catch performance issues before you even deploy.

In this webinar with Sean Glover, Senior Consultant at Lightbend and industry veteran, we examine the rise of streaming systems built around Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra and Kafka, their role in handling endless streams of data to gain real-time insights, and how Lightbend Fast Data Platform (FDP) brings them together in a comprehensive, easy to use, integrated platform, which includes installation, integration, and monitoring tools tuned for various deployment scenarios, plus sample applications.

Lightbend attended the first conferences of the season, including JFokus, DevNexus and a number of user group meetups. Now it's time to look into what else the communities around Scala, Akka, Play and Lagom have been up to and pick your lunch break reads for the coming weeks.

Last year, more than 18,000 people registered for over 25 public and private webinars featuring Lightbend engineers, industry luminaries, industry analysts and even a few Lightbend customers, such as Verizon (case study) and PayPal (case study). This comes out to over a full, 24-hour day of presentations, which can be a bit daunting to dive into. So, to make it easier, we've listed the top 10 most popular webinars that we hosted in 2016, according to our registration numbers. We hope you find this list helpful!

In this webinar, special guest Vaughn Vernon explains why the Actor Model is so vital to the future of developing and embracing distributed, Reactive systems deployed on hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Welcome to the first Tech Digest in 2017. The year has been off to an intense start and I'm happy to present the latest installment of the best resources around the Lightbend communities. 

This is the last Tech Digest in 2016. While hopefully all of you enjoy some downtime during the holiday season, we end this year with a recap of the happenings in our community in December.

In this webinar aimed at Architects and Developers working with more traditional Java environments, Lightbend’s Sean Walsh and Duncan DeVore take us on a journey that goes beyond just asynchronous programming and into the very basics of designing Reactive systems as a whole...

Most likely, your job is heavily focused on helping your organization modernize for the digital era. As the days of purely Object-Oriented Programming and related frameworks come to a close, enterprises migrating to distributed, cloud infrastructures are embracing a different approach: the Actor Model.

Winter is coming. But nothing stops the November Tech Digest on Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala!

In this talk for Architects and Dev Managers by Akara Sucharitakul, Principal MTS for Global Platform Frameworks at PayPal, we look at how back-pressure based on Akka Streams and Kafka is being used in PayPal's mission-critical production systems to handle very bursty workloads.

We proudly announce the launch of Lightbend Solution Architect Hugh McKee's concise, 43-page O'Reilly book Designing Reactive Systems: The Role Of Actors In Distributed Architecture, which covers what your team should know about the Actor Model from the ground up. In less than 1 hour.

In this webinar, Lightbend’s Big Data Architect, Dr. Dean Wampler, examines the rise of streaming systems for handling time-sensitive problems, exploring the characteristics of fast data architectures and the open source tools for implementing them.

Recently, the Lightbend team sponsored O'Reilly SACon London and met hundreds of architects, executives and developers interested in modernizing with Reactive technologies. In this interview with Mike Henderson, VP of Content at O'Reilly, Lightbend's Duncan DeVore, co-author of the Manning book Reactive Application Development, talks about the differences between Reactive Programming (one component of Reactive systems) and Reactive System Design, which looks at a much broader whole.

We are proud to announce the availability of Scala 2.12.0!

Scala By the Bay (SBTB) is the oldest and biggest West Coast Scala conference in the US, continuously run since 2013. For years Typesafe, now Lightbend, has been instrumental in its home community. We are happy to extend our special discount LIGHTBEND20 to the whole conference, fully hosted at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for the first time on November 11-13. 

Switching on the lights to fight the dark half of the year. The October Tech Digest is here to learn about Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala!

I recently had a chat with Raymond Roestenburg, co-author of Akka In Action, to ask him about how Akka brings the brilliance of the Actor Model, first developed over 40 years ago, to the mainstream embrace of the JVM, and namely Java 8.

After working together over a span of some weeks, we are now happy to announce that Akka Cluster now works on Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Our Fast Data team at Lightbend has helped create a lot of different services, webinars, books and reports over the last year, so we made a special "mega-pack" of 7 resources to help you get exactly what you need....

Starting into Autumn with the September Update on Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala. Now it’s time to sit back, grab a coffee and relax while you read through this month’s highlights!

In this webinar for Architects, guest speaker Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester Vice-President and Principal Analyst, joins Jonas Bonér, CTO/Co-founder of Lightbend and creator of Akka, the actor-based, message-driven runtime for the JVM, to discuss one emerging programming pattern that’s gaining popularity with teams developing for the cloud––the Actor model.

Apache Kafka is the leading distributed messaging system, and Reactive Streams is an emerging standard for asynchronous stream processing. The reactive-kafka project combining the two technologies just recently joint forces with the the Akka team and the resulting collaboration lead to the latest 0.11 release which comes with some major updates. I was interested in learning a little bit more about the history and had a chance to interview Chris.

August is typically a month filled with vacation, sunburn and the other joys of summer. It's a month where we all take it a bit slower and try to gather more energy for the rest of the year. But it turns out that our amazingly active communities never sleep. And there's been plenty of news and highlights. This Tech Digest is designed to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster. So sit back, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the most important information of last month in a single post.

Welcome to our first Lightbend Tech Digest! It's so exciting to keep finding new places where great technical content is published as our communities continue to grow. Inspired by the amazing efforts of our friends like SoftwareMills' Scala Times, Cake Solutions team blog, the Knoldus blog and many others, we wanted to help folks specifically interested in Lightbend technologies like Akka, Play, Lagom and Scala to find what they need faster.

In this talk by noted hAkker Konrad Malawski, we'll disambiguate what streams are and what they aren't, taking a deeper look into Akka Streams (the implementation) and Reactive Streams (the standard).

In this talk targeted at Architects and Developers, Akka engineer Konrad Malawski bends your parameters with regards to application design and asynchronous execution models. We uncover a number of rules that serve as a guide in designing concurrent distributed applications, how those apply to Akka, and how they can help you in daily app development.

Dean Wampler, Big Data Architect at Lightbend, presents the evolution of data processing needs and the reasons behind the emergence of Fast Data technologies like Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, Mesos and Reactive Platform technologies such as Akka and Play. 

Following last week's release of Reactive Microservices Architecture: Design Principles for Distributed Systems by Lightbend CTO and creator of Akka, Jonas Bonér, O'Reilly Radar podcast host Brian Foster sits down to discuss the rise of Microservices and distributed systems based on Reactive principles.

Having a team adopt new technologies and approaches to software development is a daunting task.  New paradigms and unfamiliar ontologies headline the biggest risks to having a team be productive quickly.  Lightbend has a suite of training classes to help you adopt whatever components of Reactive Platform you need to be responsive to you customers by creating resilient and elastic applications.

The Play team is proud to announce the release of Play 2.5.0!  The two major focuses of this release have been streams and Java API feature parity, and for the first time we can say anything that you can do using the Play Scala API, you can also do using the Play Java API.

When we crowdsourced questions for Viktor Klang, the response inspired one of the most comprehensive, engaging, and hilarious answers I've ever heard.

People love Apache Spark. Typesafe is the official support partner with Databricks, Mesosphere and IBM for Apache Spark. If you’re a Fast Data visionary, then you’re looking for a modern solution to enable your streaming data applications. In today’s DevOps world, you’re looking for a more accessible way to work in particular with Spark Jobs. Instead of directly mingling around with the specific Spark installation, you want to have access to a lot of functions via lightweight protocols remotely. This is the gap that Spark Job Server closes.

Akka Split Brain Resolver (Akka SBR) is a new commercial beta feature available to Typesafe Reactive Platform users for free in development, and for subscribers in production. Akka SBR expands your system’s available actions when nodes in your cluster become unreachable, reacting in the best way to address the nature of the failure and selecting a recovery path.

I am truly excited to talk to one of Typesafe's founders and CTO, Jonas Bonér. He's got thoughts on why actors are essentially microservices, and how communication protocols are important both for your Reactive systems and your love life. 

Were you able to attend our latest webinar? If not, here's your chance to catch our educational go-to guy get excited about the lastest in our Reactive Platform. Typesafe’s Senior Director of Global Services, Jamie Allen, walks you through Reactive Platform 1.0, with added features for more elasticity and resilience to address the challenges of today's main business requirements.

Konrad Malawski walks us through the new and upcoming commercial features in Typesafe's Reactive Platform. Reactive Platform is a certified, integration tested, load tested, and secured stack for building Reactive applications with Akka, Play, Spark and Scala or Java. Besides receiving priority updates and fixes, Typesafe also offers long-term support for all the contained technologies.

Everyone wants to talk with Konrad Malawski on a 1:1 basis. I'm the lucky person who got 15 minutes of his time.

If there’s one thing that’s clear this fall, it’s that conference season is in full swing. With Typesafers attending JavaOne in San Francisco, Spark Summit in Amsterdam, W-JAX in Munich, Devoxx in Belgium, YOW in Australia, Gartner Summit in Las Vegas, Scala eXchange in London and more popping on our calendars by the minute, our dance card is pretty full. That said, sometimes certain events come up that just catch your eye and you must make time for them.

It’s always fun to see your technology adopted at companies fueling innovation in their field. Our customers at iHeartMedia are doing just that in the radio broadcasting space. In a recent interview with their engineering team, we learned just how critical Typesafe technologies are to helping build new features and tackle microservices.

In September we launched our Reactive Monitoring Beta! This webinar will help you get started if you want to be a new participant, or can answer some of your questions if you're already trying it out. Typesafe's Henrik Engström along with Takipi's Tal Weiss give a comprehensive walk-through, and will answer questions like,  Reactive Monitoring wut? Also, Why Takipi? And, Is this the whatzit that will help me with lost threads on my async apps? The experts behind Akka, Play and Scala know what it takes to monitor Reactive systems, and we'll show you how. 

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!

Reactive Monitoring 1.0 Beta provides the expert instrumentation you need to effectively visualize, track and fix your Reactive applications. We understand that current available monitoring solutions give limited insight into the health, performance, and inner workings of your Reactive applications. Whether it's the inflexibility of configuration, high performance overhead, or simply lower capabilities when it comes to metrics, events, traces and thresholds for actors, what's needed is a solution by the experts behind Akka, Play and Scala. 

If we used only our hands to count the differences between traditional full stack applications and the new generation of loosely-coupled, distributed Reactive systems, we’d quickly run out of fingers. Among things like higher resiliency and better elasticity due to asynchronicity and distribution, Reactive systems are built for hybrid cloud environments, multi-core processing, in-memory computation, data streaming, experimenting using microservices instead of large monolithic app servers, and so on.  

But how do Reactive systems, namely those based on Akka Clusters employing the actor model, concurrently share data across nodes, especially in light of issues like network partitions? This is when one or more nodes in the cluster become unresponsive to pings, and must be handled appropriately. After all, the node that believes the others to be unreachable may in fact be the unreachable node, and it’s good to know this...

Ed Callahan, Senior Engineer at Typesafe, kicks off the series with a broad overview of Typesafe ConductR, a solution for managing Typesafe Reactive Platform-based applications using Play, Akka and Scala or Java across a cluster of machines. In this series, we’ll see how ConductR manages this new wave of message-driven, elastic, resilient and responsive applications while complementing existing configuration and management tools and developer workflow...

In April, 2013, we published a blog post about Enterprise Scala Adoption Tips, but the time has come for an update. Not only that, we need to focus on how to help enterprise organizations adopt Scala and also the Typesafe Reactive Platform in general. Many enterprises make the decision to leverage Akka and Play Framework from the Java API, which we fully support.

As more enterprise organizations adopt Scala/Akka/Play, we find it important to help them engage the community effectively. This involves providing them with information about where they can find resources to empower their developers to learn as much about these technologies as possible, as well as to directly engage with the community on a daily basis. By following these steps, the likelihood of successfully adopting these technologies is much higher.

In a recent conversation on the Akka User Google Group, we came across a very salient conversation in which we found some very straight answers to questions that architects ask themselves when deciding to adopt a tool or not. The answers below are from Justin du Coeur, the creator of Querki. Querki is still in beta, and represents is a new way of organizing your personal information powered by Scala, Akka, Play and Scala.js. As a one-man show, Justin wears many hats, which makes him an ideal candidate for cutting to the root of matter with these six questions for architects. You can read more about Justin and the Querki project on the project’s development blog and his personal blog, which blends conversations about software, science-fiction, SCA and gaming.

Inspired by the introduction of functional features in Java 8, namely lambdas, it's even easier than before for Java developers to embrace tools designed for building distributed systems that deliver highly-responsive user experiences. Regardless of whether you code in Java or Scala, Typesafe Reactive Platform, including Play and Akka, provides a resilient and message-driven application stack that scales effortlessly on multicore and cloud computing architectures.

Last night at the JAX conference in Mainz, Germany, three awards were given to the most innovative forces of good working on the JVM today. In an article on JAXenter, we read that Akka received the most votes for Most Innovative Open Technology, while Java 8 was voted, somewhat circularly, for being the Most Innovative Java Technology. JAX also has a Special Jury award, for which Netflix OSS was recognized for their technological and cultural contributions to the JVM industry–and maybe to thank them for House of Cards.

Today we are thrilled by the announcement of Akka.NET 1.0, a port of Akka from the JVM to Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR). The team and community around Roger Alsing and Aaron Stannard valiantly took it upon themselves to supply the growing open-source movement in the .NET world with a full-fledged reactive toolkit, making the benefits of reactive application design available to C# and F# developers.

Today, we're proud to share a case study with our customers at BrightTALK, a leading provider of webinars and videos for professionals and their communities. In this piece, Alistair Cairns (VP of Engineering) and Brett Bell (Software Developer) discuss BrightTALK's decision to move away from the company's legacy PHP codebase to the Typesafe Reactive Platform.

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to be able to announce the availability of Akka 2.3.8. This is the eighth maintenance release of the 2.3 branch.

Our newest case study is with Nitro, a company whose software make it easy to create, edit, share, sign and collaborate with documents—online or offline. In our recent interview, Nitro's VP of Technology, Tihomir Bajic, outlines the importance of Play, Akka and Scala to the company’s product delivery evolution during their recent years of explosive growth. Back in 2011, Nitro had millions of users and a massive code base of C++ for desktop apps for document processing and workflows. Nitro’s desktop products were supported by .NET.

Today we are excited to share a technical article by our friends at GearPump (https://github.com/intel-hadoop/gearpump) a high performance, lightweight, real-time streaming engine built on top of Akka. Sean Zhong, Kam Kasravi, Huafeng Wang, Manu Zhang and Weihua Jiang have written a quick summary below, linking to the full paper. 

Today we are excited to share a new case study with our friends at Hootsuite, a widely used social media relationship platform. This specific use case focuses on Ow.ly, Hootsuite’s popular URL shortening and click analytics service. Essentially, the tool became so popular and such a critical part of the Hootsuite product, that the the engineering team found themselves dedicating much more time and cost into keeping the service performant and reliable than they expected.

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to be able to announce the availability of Akka 2.3.7. This is the seventh maintenance release of the 2.3 branch.

The akka team has been hard at work on a new version of akka streams, and this has resulted in some pretty big changes to the API. As a result, it is now well over 80% more awesome (as measured by the Standard Awesomeness Factor metric). However, some of the API changes have naturally made some of the existing examples and documentation out there a bit stale.

Today, we are excited to share a new case study with our friends at Appgree, a Spain-based startup that offers real-time surveying to large audiences about products, entertainment and more.

This month we are featuring two related Activator Templates of the Month related by purpose but divided by language

Today we're excited to share a new success story with Spendgo, a San Francisco-based technology startup innovating customer loyalty at the point-of-sale (POS).  If you’ve bought a Razzmatazz or Caribbean Passion smoothie recently, you’ve probably already interacted with Spendgo. 

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to be able to announce the availability of Akka 2.3.6. This is the sixth maintenance release of the 2.3 branch. This release contains the following improvements:

Are you interested in getting started with the Typesafe Reactive Platform but don’t know where to begin? Have you heard about Akka and Play Framework, but don’t know if either is right for your application needs? Join us for this three-part webinar series all about Activator, Play, Akka, and our surrounding ecosystem to better understand how all the pieces work together and start building reactive apps with confidence!

Since our last major release in March we have been working full steam ahead on Reactive Streams and Akka Streams, which forms the foundation onto which we are porting Spray as our new Akka HTTP module. This effort is making steady progress as witnessed by frequent milestone releases—the feedback from the community is invaluable while these exciting new technologies are taking shape. Our goal is to reach feature parity between our HTTP module and Spray by the end of October, including an implementation of Akka Streams that we consider ready for public review. We will then release these new modules for the 2.3.x series—as usual with the “experimental” marker—asking for wider testing and feedback, so that they can then be a proper part of the Akka 2.4.0 release early next year.

At Typesafe, we’re incredibly excited about the work being done around the Reactive Streams and Akka Streams projects. The Akka team is addressing major challenges we’ve been seeing from developers working with streaming data, and they’re making major headway resolving back pressure issues.  

It’s always nice to hear about real-life implementations of these projects, so we’d like to share a recent interview with Simeon Fitch, Director of Software Architecture at Elder Research, Inc. Simeon used Akka Streams to handle I/O bottlenecks in his text processing engine. In our Q&A, Simeon outlines how he ported over his existing actor system to akka-streams, hurdles he encountered along the way, and, best of all, results!

Today, we have some exciting news for anyone interested in building Spark applications with the Typesafe Reactive Platform! 

Today we’ve published a short white paper (actually it’s blue…), Introducing the Typesafe Reactive Platform. It offers a guide to Typesafe, a map of our ecosystem and additional resources for education and exploration. The aim of the white paper is to familiarize developers, enterprise architects, dev managers, CTOs, and others with Typesafe technologies and how they are used to build Reactive apps.

Good news! Ryan Knight, consultant at Typesafe, created a new DZone Refcard, Reactive Programming with Akka, for your Akka learning pleasure. Refcardz serve as the ultimate cheat sheets for staying on top of the newest technologies, so this is a great tool if you're just getting started with Akka.

Last week we hosted Akka Days, two days of webinars focused on bringing your Akka apps to production. The webinars focused on tips, tricks and advice for how make sure your transition from development to production is smooth and successful. 

I started my first Hadoop-based, Big Data projects four years ago. As an experienced Enterprise and Internet developer with a love of Scala, it was frustrating to find that writing Hadoop jobs was hard to do in the tedious, low-level MapReduce API. The powerful, functional programming operations we know and love in Scala’s collections were absent. 

Excited to share our newest case study with the WhitePages team! By replacing Perl and Ruby applications with Scala-based code and an Akka runtime environment, the WhitePages was able to deliver huge improvements in application speed and hardware utilization.

Today, we're excited to share a new case study with Kifi, an innovative startup that is creating a new way to search the Internet and store or share information. 

With the five year anniversary of Akka coming up on July 12, I started to reflect on some of the key moments. As I sat there jotting down milestones (thinking I'd just do a quick blog post), a rush of memories hit me with respect to inspirations, people, and milestones that all contributed to Akka becoming what it is today.

We are very happy and excited to release the first preview of Akka HTTP’s core module based on an updated preview of Akka Streams. It is the fruit of the collaboration between the Spray and Akka teams and aims to bring you fully reactive HTTP streams.

This week we published a case study with our partners at SoftwareMill. Read how SoftwareMill helped Yap.TV develop a high-performance, resilient and scalable backend with Scala, Akka and Spray.io in "Yap.TV Goes Reactive!"

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to be able to announce the availability of Akka 2.3.3. This is the third maintenance release of the 2.3 branch. It contains fixes for several issues and performance improvements.

Today, we're excited to share a blog post from our customer Workday, about how they used Akka to build a complex Job Grid.

Last week we hosted a webinar, Introducing Reactive Streams, with Roland Kuhn, Akka tech lead. Over 900 people registered for the event, and we had some really great questions submitted for the Q&A. Konrad Malawski, software engineer at Typesafe, responded to folks in real time, but we thought our readers might find some of the conversations interesting, so we’re sharing on our blog!

Watch our newest webinar, "Introducing Reactive Streams" with Roland Khun, Akka tech lead at Typesafe.

Today we're excited to announce two new customer success stories, Tomax and Walmart Canada! Both cases support the traction reactive programming has made in the retail and ecommerce space, particularly when paired with Gilt's case study, which we published several months ago. Below is a quick summary of the accounts, we encourage you to read all three case studies to see how Typesafe's technologies are powering a new wave of retail apps!

Today we are excited to reveal early preview releases of two major projects the Akka team has been involved in to improve data streaming on the JVM:  Akka Streams and Reactive Streams.

Reactive Streams is a collaboration between heavy hitters in the area of streaming data on the JVM and Akka Streams. The Akka implementation of the Reactive Streams specification effort is based on Actors as its mechanism for execution, distribution and resilience.

With the recent release of Java 8 we’ve been very excited to show how to use the new language features when building Reactive applications. I previously detailed how to use Java 8 with the Play Framework and this is a follow-up post introducing Akka with Java 8.

Yesterday we hosted a webinar, "Going Reactive with Java 8," which explored how lambdas make building Reactive applications a whole lot easier and cleaner.

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to be able to announce the availability of Akka 2.3.1. This is the second first maintenance release of the 2.3 branch, containing documentation improvements and fixing several issues including:

We are very excited about the release of Java 8!  The new Lambda syntax makes it much easier for Java developers to go Reactive. The foundation of Reactive is Event-Driven. To be Event Driven you need an easy way to create and spawn up small independent tasks in an asynchronous fashion. Lambdas gives us exactly this, avoiding the usual anonymous inner classes that make code hard to comprehend. Combining Lambdas with Akka and Play Framework create a concise and cohesive programming model for Reactive applications on the JVM.

As many of our readers know, we've been hosting monthly webinars now since August 2013, and (aside from some problems with Citrix not supporting Linux) have experienced great success sharing content about our platform and related technologies with our community. Some of our most successful webinars have been Stefan Zeiger's Introducing Slick 2.0, Mathias Doenitz' s presentation about Spray on Akka, and James Ward on Optimizing Play for Production. 

Typesafe is proud to announce the release of Akka 2.3.0, the first step of the Rollins milestone which includes Akka Persistence, Java 8 support and improvements to Akka Cluster.

Typesafe is proud to announce the release of Akka 2.2.4. This maintenance release contains several small fixes and improvements.

Phew! Another day, another case study. Today we're excited to share how Raymond Roestenburg from Xebia created a solution that allows the Dutch Rail Network to accurately track and account for cargo moving around the country using mobile apps built with Akka and Spray. 

We launched a store, featuring sweet new designs for Scala, Akka, Play Framework and Activator!  Order swag for meetups, buy gifts for team members, or just show off your Reactive style by wearing a customized shirt or hoodie. We’ll be adding more items periodically, so check back in for new gear. 

A big thanks to the folks at Coursera for telling their success story in our newest case study, "Making online education accessible with Typesafe." Coursera's popular online education service delivers high quality classes directly to users desktops, and turned the company into an overnight success. Delivering any service in a scalable, seamless manner however, is hard to do without the right tools. Coursera decided to utilize the Typesafe Reactive Platform to handle the massive scale and concurrency issues they faced. 

This in-depth case study outlines how Typesafe helped Viridity Energy, an innovative software platform in the energy market, build an elegant architecture for their enterprise application, VPower. With Scala and Akka, VPower is able to hide the complexity of the energy markets, link customer energy usage and market price data and provide clear, actionable information to its customers that can dramatically reduce their energy costs. 

We're excited to publish our newest case study with HolidayCheck, Germany's largest online travel site and agency. To manage massive scale (30 million monthly visitors!), dynamic cloud and cluster deployments, polyglot persistence and simple API usage, HolidayCheck turned to Typesafe to help architect a solid and reliable foundation that could support their international user base.

Check out our newest case study with CCAD, an organization that helps cable companies worldwide deliver audio/video content to subscribers. A joint venture between Comcast and Arris Group (which acquired Motorola Home), CCAD focuses on the development of future conditional access technologies, and supporting infrastructure deployed among major operators worldwide. 

It's Typesafe Day at Manning Publications! Save 50% on selected books covering Scala, Play, Akka, and other related technologies. Just enter tsdotd14 in the Promotional Code box when you check out at manning.com to save half. The offer expires at midnight EST December 19, 2013.

Hot off the presses, our newest case study with the team at Janrain! Thomas Lockney, software engineer at Janrain, talks about how the Typesafe Reactive Platform helps scale Janrain's User Management Platform. The study outlines how Janrain selected Scala for two standard “stacks” that Thomas' team utilizes: Akka with Spray for Web Services, and Play Web Framework for user interface development. 

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to announce the availability of Akka 2.3-M2 (PRE-RELEASE MILESTONE TWO). It is a preview on what is going to become Akka 2.3, so please give us feedback! This is probably the last milestone before the first 2.3.0 release candidate, which is estimated to be available at the end of January 2014.

Conspire is a robust tool for analyzing email data that gives users detailed analytics about their email network so they can better understand the strengths of their connections. To build a solid foundation for their customer-facing product, they turned to Akka and Scala for scalability, resiliency and simplicity.

When working in a distributed company, tools that easily enable cross-team, low-friction and global collaboration are key to productive communication - something we’ve definitely learned at Typesafe!

In previous blog posts we have presented the fantastic result of Running 2400 Nodes and Starting up 1000 Nodes on Google Compute Engine (GCE). Now we will share the how-to experience we acquired when performing those tests. 

In the previous post we described how we were able to operate an Akka cluster of 2400 nodes on Google Compute Engine (GCE). In that test the nodes were added slowly—stretching the process over a total period of four hours—to also verify the cluster’s stability over time with repeated membership changes.

We’re so excited that Google gave us 3000 cores to test a large Akka cluster on Google Compute Engine (GCE), which is an infrastructure-as-a-service that lets you run your large-scale computing workloads on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure. Google views Akka as a powerful tool for exploring the limits of GCE to run Akka/Java applications, so we were honored to  participate with their performance tests.

This week, our Director of Engineering, Viktor Klang, hosted a webinar—Failure: The Good Parts. In the presentation, Klang explores best practices for recovery, testing and checking when building concurrent, distributed software, and outlines how failure management is not an option.

Sometimes you stumble upon a blog post that so perfectly speaks for your technology that it makes you giddy. That's what happened when our team came accross Ryan Tanner's recent series on Akka at Conspire. The four-part blog post chronicles how a team of three people built a scalable backend with Scala and Akka in just three months- only one of them having used Scala in the past! 

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to announce the availability of Akka 2.2.3!

We—the Akka committers—are pleased to announce the availability of Akka 2.3-M1 (Pre-Release Milestone One), a preview of what is going to become Akka 2.3, so please give us feedback!

After the very successful collaboration between the Spray and Akka teams: creating the new Akka IO module; we are thrilled to announce that this collaboration has been taken to the next level by merging the Akka and Spray projects—absorbing the awesome capabilities of Spray’s HTTP into Akka. With this, Spray will become a supported part of the Typesafe Reactive Platform.

Join us on October 30th for a webinar with Typesafe's Director of Engineering, the Legend of Viktor Klang, wherein he'll equip you with tools and strategies for dealing for system failures.

When an actor confers with another to use its services—most likely on a remote actor system—you will always have to handle the case that the other actor goes away. Either it terminates or the node crashes or the network connection fails, sooner or later something will go wrong. Instead of making dedicated network monitoring available, Akka follows a more general approach, focusing on the service you need instead of on the implementation details.

Our newest case study outlines how Auvik Networks is using the Typesafe Platform to build a radically simple, cloud-managed network automation platform to alleviate pains of computer networking. In the network world, managing an enterprise network can be complex and full of headaches and there are lots of technologies at play – VLAN’s, routes, dynamic routes, ACL’s, etc. Expecting an IT professional to develop a massively distributed system that encompasses hundreds of different nodes with numerous criteria to write all the business logic is an extremely challenging proposition.

After Gawker Media made the move to consolidate a previously fragmented infrastructure under a JVM based umbrella, they selected the Typesafe Platform as a natural choice to help manage their extreme scalability requirements. Gawker experiences over 80 million unique page visitors monthly, produces eight original brands with a collective audience of tens of millions of US readers, and has a development team split between the US and Europe- needless to say scale and a robust platform are necessities to help manage growth!

A UK broadcaster required an innovative solution to their increasing business intelligence problem, so they turned to Valtech, a Global Digital Media Agency, to turn their product vision into reality. Always looking for the most suitable and efficient tool for the job, Valtech selected the Typesafe Platform; the combination of a Rapid Application Development web framework, scalability,and interoperability with the Java ecosystem made it a compelling offering. 

We are pleased to announce the availability of Akka 2.2.1. This is the first maintenance release of the 2.2 branch, containing documentation improvements and fixing several issues.

Primetalk Speech Portal is a new platform for building spoken dialog systems that delivers flexible and interactive dialogs as a human-computer interface for diverse information systems. The Primetalk team has the ambitious mission to replace the awkward interactive voice response systems (IVR) that are commonplace today, with user-friendly spoken dialog systems (SDS) and they're doing so with Akka and Scala!

47 Degrees is a software development and creative agency focused on the development of native mobile apps and highly scalable back-ends and API’s. In order to meet the unpredictable scaling requirements of their diverse client base, the company decided to switch from Java back-ends based on Spring, to Scala and the Typesfe Platform. The initial choice to adopt Scala was simle for 47 Degrees- being a Java shop, the team knew Scala could allow them to leverage and reuse many of their existing Java libraries and make a gradual migration of their current code bases while boosting developer productivity.

In an effort to deliver a robust system that would enable marketers and advertisers to consistently reach consumers across multiple devices, Tapad selected the Lightbend Platform to accomplish this monumental task. Tapad has proven to be a leader in cross-screen advertising technology, adddressing the new and ever-evolving reality of media consumption on smartphones, tablets and home computers.

In our newest case study, Tindr discusses the future of note taking with Knowtaker, built with the Typesafe Platform. Knowtaker vision is to revolutionize digital note taking by automatically pulling important phrases and reminders out of your notes and placing them front and center in your day-to-day life. 

Cake Solutions, an enterprise software solutions provider that architects and implements modern software for organizations, is on the Scala track! Cake aims to be well ahead of the technology curve by constantly evaluating the marketplace for products worthy of inclusion in their portfolio. This method offers Cake Solutions’ clients the very latest technology and equips their businesses with a technical competitive edge. The Typesafe Platform is a perfect example of a modern tool that Cake Solutions implements and uses to offer clients these advantages.

Gilt recently migrated to the Typesafe Platform for their modern e-commerce system.  We’ve written up a case study to capture all the details of why they moved to Play Framework, Akka, and Scala.  We also wanted to get more insight into their architecture and motivations for the switch, so we sat down with their tech team for a short Q&A...

Our newest case study discusses how a company made the switch from Ruby to Scala in order to meet the requirements of their next generation native advertising platform.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Akka 2.2.0 "Coltrane." This is the second evolutionary step of the Akka 2 series outlined in our roadmap. The biggest feature is cluster support, which has already been part of the 2.1 release as an experimental preview. We have improved, tested and hardened it and, thanks to the valuable feedback from our users, can confidently remove the "experimental" flag: Akka cluster is now officially supported.

Our own Jamie Allen recently travelled to South America to spend time with the amazing Typesafe developer community while attending conferences and meetups. He shared an awesome write up of his travels below! Thanks, Jamie for sharing...

Last week the community contributed two new Typesafe Activator templates that are helping developers learn how to build modern web apps with the Typesafe Platform. Matthias Nehlsen's SSE Chat Template with AngularJS template and Jan Machacek's Akka and Spray template are fantastic additions to the growing list of Activator templates.

Today we're excited to share a new Typesafe case study, courtesy of the folks at Klout! Klout has been the leader in measuring online influence by calculating a user's social impact through extensive data mining.

We all know the newspaper industry has been in a steady transition from print to digital since the web transformed the way readers consume and journalists share news. The Guardian is a UK-based newspaper that has been at the forefront of this transformation, changing from a print-based organization to one that is digital-first in philosophy and practice. Implementing this new strategy has involved a series of bold changes not only to the way they do things, but with the tools and software they used to accomplish these tasks.

The Akka API is offered both for Java and Scala users, and most of it is actually reusing the exact same methods - a feat enabled by Scala's carefully crafted Java interoperability. Until now there has been only one tool which could extract API do...

We are pleased to announce the first maintenance release of the 2.1.x series of the Akka toolkit, fixing several issues including the following:

• A possible thread leak at system shutdown
• A bug in the scheduler which would delay tasks too long if scheduled a multiple of the wheel duration (defaults to 51.2 seconds) into the future
• Wrong error handling when sending non-serializable or too large remote messages, leading to silent loss and extraneous reconnect

This update is backwards binary compatible, meaning that the JAR files of release 2.1.1 are a drop-in replacement for 2.1.0—but not the other way around. We recommend that all users upgrade at their earliest convenience. Please refer to the full announcement for more details.

Happy hAkking!

We have released an update to Akka, addressing several small bugs and fixes. The most notable changes are:

• Allow null as reply from a TypedActor
• Properly set stateData when stopping an FSM Actor
• Fix a regression introduced in version 2.0.4 within the embedded ForkJoinPool implementation (only relevant for direct users of the JSR166 API)

Please see the full announcement for more details.

Happy hAkking!

We are pleased to announce the availability of Akka 2.1.0 ‘Mingus.’ This is the next step of Akka’s evolution, following the major transformation that was 2.0—you are invited to look back at the announcement from March 6, 2012. The 2.0 release laid the groundwork, with a completely message-based internal structure that enables your actor-based services to interact regardless of where they are hosted. As a result, you can scale up and out by configuration at deployment time. Today’s release adds cluster support, forming a powerful substrate on which elastic cloud-based applications are built.

We have released an update to the Akka middleware, which fixes several bugs and is binary compatible with previous releases in the 2.0.x series. The most notable changes are:

• Fix a divide-by-zero bug in routers
• Fix a wrap-around bug in HashedWheelTimer which would expire timeouts early
• Stop using Unsafe.throwException to allow running on Android
• Configurable worker pool size in remoting to allow running with fewer threads

We strongly recommend updating all projects using the 2.0 series to this version. Please see the full announcement for more details.

Happy hAkking!

Today we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of the Akka 2.0 open source project, which is at the heart of the Typesafe Stack 2.0.