Dear hakkers,

We are pleased to announce a new patch release of Akka 2.5. This release mostly contains small fixes across the board and our continued work on Akka Typed. Some notable improvements and bug fixes in 2.5.9 are:

• Update to Aeron 1.7.0 for Artery #24169
• Optimizations of Cluster Sharding #24064 and #24191
• New top-level protobuf serializer for Address #24265
• Provide a fail-fast on version number too low for libraries #24030
• Graceful handover when cluster client receptionist shuts down #24179
• Add overload with Function0 predicate to ReceiveBuilder #15446

A total of 42 issues were closed since 2.5.8. The complete list can be found on the 2.5.9 milestone on github.

Akka 2.4.x End Of Life

Please be advised that Akka 2.4.x has reached its End Of Life (EOL) date as of 12/31/2017.

Upgrading to Akka 2.5.x from the 2.4.x series should be very simple, as 2.5 keeps backwards binary compatibility, in accordance to our documented compatibility guidelines.

This especially means that guaranteed hotfixes for this branch will not be available after this point. We always recommend staying up to date with the latest release, which is currently Akka 2.5.9. When upgrading please make sure to utilize the migration documentation as necessary.

Akka Typed

There are several breaking changes in the under-development “may change” Akka Typed module.

Our goal is to ship a production ready version of Akka Typed as soon as possible and therefore we have removed the new runtime implementation and initially only support running typed actors with the underlaying untyped actor system. See the Coexistence blog post.

Some major structural changes to Akka Typed have been done, such as splitting up in separate modules e.g. akka-actor-typed with package root akka.actor.typed, and akka-cluster-typed with package akka.cluster.typed.

Akka Typed in 2.5.9 is not ready yet, and we will continue working on it the next few weeks with more expected breaking changes. If you are using Typed already and would prefer a single migration task you should stay on version 2.5.8 until we have completed these changes.

Credits

For this release we had the help of 24 committers – thank you all very much!

commits  added  removed
     18   7067     7853 Christopher Batey
      8    717      576 Johan Andrén
      6   1101      966 Konrad `ktoso` Malawski
      6    268       45 Patrik Nordwall
      5    106       13 kerr
      4      5       21 Arnout Engelen
      3     43       16 Nafer Sanabria
      3      3        3 Philippus Baalman
      2      5        2 Ignasi Marimon-Clos
      1    153        8 fredfp
      1    105        2 lorenzhawkes
      1     39       29 Łukasz Drygała
      1     30        3 Pritam Kadam
      1      7        2 Sebastian Harko
      1      3        3 Sakthipriyan Vairamani
      1      3        3 Steffen Gebert
      1      2        2 Heiko Seeberger
      1      1        2 WangYifu
      1      1        1 Akinmolayan Olushola
      1      2        0 Josep Prat
      1      1        1 Shajahan Palayil
      1      1        1 Rebecca Grenier
      1      1        1 Manuel Bernhardt
      1      1        0 Ayush Mishra

Happy hakking!

– The Akka Team