SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 22, 2015) - Typesafe, provider of the world's leading Reactive platform and the company behind Play Framework, Akka, and Scala, today announced that Akka has been honored by JAX readers as the "Most Innovative Open Source Tech in 2015." Akka is a toolkit and runtime for concurrent, distributed and resilient message-driven applications on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
First developed in Scala by Jonas Bonér in 2009, Akka was inspired by Erlang's library support for writing highly concurrent and resilient message-driven applications. Having since joined the Typesafe Platform, the toolkit's modular structure, resilience, elasticity and adaptability has won over a significant following (lovingly called 'hakkers'), including firms like Amazon, Cisco and eBay, as well as an active base of code contributors around the world.
Akka's biggest contribution to the JVM ecosystem is its approach to failure management. It allows developers to design for failure; to manage failure in isolation (so called "bulkheading") without worrying about it cascading across the application. By moving away from the broken, synchronous exception model (try-catch) in Java, it allows you to reify the failures as messages that can be sent off asynchronously to any interested party, not just thrown in the user's face, taking down the whole call stack along with it -- and to build systems that are truly Reactive .
"Akka is both addressing real pain points in today's systems, and is pushing the envelope and innovation in the industry," said Bonér. "Akka makes you feel empowered by making things that used to be very hard quite easy and straightforward, allowing you to do things that you didn't dare do before -- and something that I hear a lot is that it 'makes programming fun again.'"
The JAX Innovation Awards , which have been running since 2007, celebrate "outstanding innovation" within the tech sector, with a particular emphasis on "those who foster and drive Java and open technologies." Thousands of developers worldwide submitted their votes on this year's best Java and Open Source innovators.
Additional Resources:
About Typesafe Typesafe (Twitter: @Typesafe) is dedicated to helping developers build Reactive applications on the JVM. With the Typesafe Reactive Platform, developers can create modern, message-driven applications that scale on multicore and cloud computing architectures. Typesafe Activator, a browser-based tool with reusable templates, makes it easy to get started with Play Framework, Akka and Scala. Backed by Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Juniper Networks, Typesafe is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Switzerland and Sweden. To start building Reactive applications today, download Typesafe Activator here.
