Dear hakkers,

as a special present for the holidays, we are happy to announce Akka Http 10.1.0-RC1, the first release candidate of the upcoming minor release series of Akka HTTP. The goal for this upcoming minor release is to be able to cleanup some technical debt and make the switch to Akka 2.5 which in the future will enable us to make use of features only available in Akka 2.5. Also, the new client pool implementation is now the default.

We wish everyone happy holidays and a happy new year! Thanks to all our users and contributors for all the great feedback and collaboration!

The most important changes for this release are

• Removing support for Akka 2.4.x which is at its end-of-life with the end of 2017. In the future, this will allow us to make use of features that only Akka 2.5 supports.
• Removing methods that have been deprecated during the life-time of Akka HTTP 10.0.x. For now, methods only deprecated in the last release of Akka HTTP, 10.0.11, are not yet removed to allow for a smooth transition.
• The new client pool implementation introduced in 10.0.11 is now the default. Please try it out and provide feedback during the RC period of this release so we can iron out any problems we may have missed initially.
• Documentation has now ~almost~ completely been consolidated between Scala and Java pages. Hundreds of directive documentation pages have been merged in a tireless effort by @jonas, @jlprat, and Akka team’s @raboof. We also restructured the table of contents to improve the documentation browsing experience.

Akka is not an explicit dependency any more / Removal of Akka 2.4 support

Akka HTTP 10.0.x has always supported Akka 2.5, while allowing users to still remain on Akka 2.4.x if they choose to do so. By now Akka 2.4 has reached its end of life. Therefore, Akka HTTP 10.1.x only supports Akka 2.5 (and future versions during the life of Akka HTTP 10.1.x) so we will be able to make of features only provided by Akka 2.5.

Using Akka HTTP with Akka 2.5 used to be a bit confusing, because Akka HTTP explicitly depended on Akka 2.4. Trying to use it together with Akka 2.5, running an Akka HTTP application could fail with class loading issues if you forgot to add a dependency to both akka-actor and akka-stream of the same version. For that reason, we changed the policy not to depend on akka-stream explicitly any more but mark it as a provided dependency in our build. That means that you will have to always add a manual dependency to akka-stream. Please make sure you have chosen and added a dependency to akka-stream when updating to the new version. (Veterans may remember this policy from spray.)

Deprecation Removals

Methods were removed that have been deprecated during the life-time of Akka HTTP 10.0.x. Methods that were only deprecated in the last release of Akka HTTP, 10.0.11, are not yet removed to allow for a smooth transition. In general, our guarantee for minor release updates is that code that compiled on the latest version of the previous minor release (10.0.11 in this case) should be both source and binary compatible with the latest version of the current minor release. We might make exceptions to the rule for cases where the maintenance burden seems greater than the risk of breaking major users / third-party libraries. We’ll treat any other binary incompatibilities as regressions.

New client pool implementation is now the default

The new client pool implementation introduced in 10.0.11 is now the default. In this release we fixed several bugs in the new client pool implementation and we want to foster its adoption. Please try it out and provide feedback during the RC period of this release so we can iron out any problems we may have missed initially. You can still fall back to the old implementation by setting akka.http.host-connection-pool.pool-implementation = legacy.

List of changes

Improvements

akka-http-core

• Add missing javadsl model bits and pieces (#1679)
• New client pool is now the default
• Several improvements and fixes to new client pool implementation
• Methods deprecated before (but not including) 10.0.11 were removed
• Add convenience Java DSL Http.cachedHostConnectionPoolHttps (#1644)
• Add Retry-After header model (#1554)
• Adding percent encoding length check for Path.Uri (#1553)

akka-http

• Methods deprecated before (but not including) 10.0.11 were removed

akka-http-caching

• Add non-lambda-capturing getOrLoad method to Cache (#1536)

Documentation

• Almost the complete directive documentation has now been consolidated between Java and Scala. More than hundred pages have been simplified like this.
• The top-level documentation structure has been clarified.

Bug Fixes

akka-http-core

• Fix return type for withStatus methods to return proper scaladsl types (#1623)
• Fix “Cannot push port … twice” in NewHostConnectionPool (#1610) and several other fixes

Documentation

• Fix generation/publication of javadoc (10.0.11 javadoc link pointed to scaladoc instead)

Credits

A total of 49 issues were closed since 10.0.11.

The complete list of closed issues can be found on the 10.1.0-RC1 milestone milestones on GitHub.

For this release we had the help of 13 contributors – thank you all very much!

commits added removed
   44    4841    4860 Arnout Engelen
   32    1196     613 Johannes Rudolph
   22     720    2789 Josep Prat
    3     122     349 Jonas Fonseca
    2      28      17 Pavel Boldyrev
    1       6       4 Johan Andrén
    1     128       4 Martynas Mickevičius
    1     111       1 Ivano Pagano
    1      21       1 Kentaro Maeda
    1       1       1 Philippus Baalman
    1       2       0 Jimin Hsieh
    1       1       1 David Francoeur
    1      23       2 Catalin Ursachi

Happy hakking and happy holidays to everyone!

– The Akka Team