Another milestone for open source cloud programming model ActorFx, more stability, async actor communication and more

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Our team is making steady progress on building a solid framework for our new open source computing model for the cloud ActorFx, and we’re happy to report that we just released version 0.40 for this ActorFx project on CodePlex.

ActorFx provides a non-prescriptive, language-independent model of dynamic distributed objects for highly available data structures and other logical entities via a standardized framework and infrastructure.

Since Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., announced that ActorFx joined the MS Open Tech Hub in December, we’ve been hard at work at adding new features in regular releases.

For this release we focused on adding some interesting features that enriches the framework and makes it suitable for a wider range of scenarios.

  • We added a DictionaryActor, accompanied by a C# CloudDictionary<TKey,TValue> client. This is just another example of rich distributed data structures that can leverage the ActorFx infrastructure for high availability.
  • We added support for asynchronous actor-to-actor method calls (details can be found in the documentation included in the "ActorFx Basics" doc on the codeplex project).
  • We added support for actor methods written in languages other than C#. For now, we support actor methods written in JavaScript. Documentation is included in the "ActorFx Basics" doc.
  • We also spent some time to improve stability. We've added sensible handling for "transient" errors from the Actor Runtime (like NoWriteQuorum).

We are already working on the V0.50 release. Let us know if there is any feature you would like to be added to the ActorFx project and, as always, comments and feedback are welcome.

The ActorFx team:

Claudio Caldato, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

Brian Grunkemeyer, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft Open Technologies Hub

Joe Hoag, Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft Open Technologies Hub