Atmosphere Framework 2.0 drops today

When Atmosphere 1.0 dropped just over a year ago, we wrote about the increasing demand in the software industry for multitasking asynchronous frameworks. There was a lot of excitement swirling around this launch, which was the first and only asynchronous JavaScript/Java Portable framework to run on the JVM. Check out this excellent tutorial by JeanFrancois Arcand for more details on how it all works.

Roll on 12 months, and a highly excited Async-IO development team has broken the news this morning (11am GMT) that Atmosphere Framework has reached 2.0 status (seriously, count the exclamation marks! in the official press! release!).

So, what’s changed with the next generation of Atmosphere? According to the creators, along with the performance and cache memory improvements that have taken place in the intervening months between the two big releases, the most noticeable developments will be improved memory usage under high loads as well as better WebSocket/fallbacks transport performance. There’s also been a plethora of bug fixing and other fine tuning.

Additionally, the program’s deployment range has now extended to Nettophere, Play! Framework and Vert.x. Atmosphere 2.0 can also support WebSockets on JBoss 7.2.x and WildFly’s new Servlet Container Undertow.

From a developer standpoint, Atmosphere 2.0 is aiming to make life easier with the addition of several @Service annotations, designed to simplify the development cycle.  Other revamps include improved BroadcasterCache, State Recovery after a network outage, Heart Beat Support for Proxy lover, and revamped GWT support.

Bundled within the Atmosphere Framework 2.0.Stack are the following components: 

• runtime: server side components for Servlet based framework.

• javascript: client side library for Atmosphere

• wAsync: Java client side library for Atmosphere

• NettoSphere: server side server running on top of the Netty Framework

• VertoSphere: server side server running on top of the Vert.x Framework

• Playtosphere: server side server running on top of the Play! Framework

You can get your hands on the all-singing, all-dancing new version of Atmosphere here.