Starting into Autumn with the September Update on Akka, Lagom, Play and Scala

To contribute to amplifying the news, articles, guides and how-tos out there, feel free to reach out on Twitter at @myfear to point me towards relevant resources.
Now it’s time to sit back, grab a coffee and relax while you read through this month’s highlights!

News

• JVM developers moving to containers and microservices to keep up with fast data - The Java EE app server may be dying, but a new Lightbend survey sheds light on where developers are placing their bets.
• New book: Akka in Action released!
• Lagom 1.2_RC released - The primary new feature of Lagom 1.1 was Maven support. The biggest feature of Lagom 1.2 is message broker support. Lagom now supports JDBC both for storing persistent entities, as well as for implementing read-sides.
• Akka 2.4.10 Released!

Articles, Webinars and Books

• Akka starter kit - high level information about Akka along with a list of useful resources that will definitely help you to get started.
• Custom Flows: Parsing XML (part I) - Learn how to master the more advanced territory of custom Flows.
• Flow control at the boundary of Akka Streams and a data provider
• Akka Streams Kafka 0.11 - A behind the scenes Interview
• Benefits Of The Actor Model For Cloud Computing: A Pragmatic Overview For Java Architects
• Fast Data Architectures For Streaming Applications: free O'Reilly report by Dean Wampler
• Akka Persistence: Testing Persistent Actors How to test persistent Actors.
• Benchmarking akka-stream-kafka - The new API got reviewed and tested in order to bring satisfying throughput for most important scenarios.
• Getting started with Akka Stream Kafka – Using Kafka the reactive streams way

Code-snippets and other highlights

• Akka HTTP + Akka Streams + Akka Actors Integration Example - This application is able to respond with a Streaming JSON response of Chuck Norris jokes.
• developer.lightbend.com is launched! Guides, Documentation and further learning material: All in one place now! 
• Play with Scala and Akka in your browser!
• Webinar Recording: Introduction to Akka Actors with Java 8
• Actor System Termination on JVM Shutdown - Some handy examples of how to gracefully shutdown the actor system.

Thanks for reading! To get the freshest updates, follow @Lightbend, @AkkaTeam, @Lagom, @playframework, @scala_lang and @scala_sbt on Twitter.

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Author

Markus Eisele

Director Developer Advocacy, Lightbend, Inc.

Twitter: @myfear   GitHub: myfear

Markus is a Java Champion, former Java EE Expert Group member, founder of JavaLand, reputed speaker at Java conferences around the world, and a very well known figure in the Enterprise Java world.