Version 0.4 released

The main feature of version 0.4 is a streamlined and bugfixed network layer. Of course, there are some new features as well:

• Support for User-Defined Network Layer
  The functions publish and remote_actor were overloaded to allow user-defined network layers such as OpenSSL; see this mailing list discussion and the doxygen documentation of util::input_stream, util::output_stream and util::acceptor for more details.
  
• Shutdown Function
  The new shutdown() function closes all network connections, stops the scheduler and deletes all of libcppa's singletons. It is strongly recommended to call this function before returning from main(), especially if you are connected to remote actors.
  
• Syntactic Sugar for Synchronous Messaging
  Synchronous message handling using futures is flexible but sometimes too verbose.

  auto future = sync_send(...);
  handle_response(future, ...);  // event-based API
  receive_response(future, ...); // blocking API

  Version 0.4 provides some syntactic sugar to make your code more compact. Whenever you send a message and immediately wait for the response, you can write the following instead.

  sync_send(...).then(...);  // event-based API
  sync_send(...).await(...); // blocking API

  Furthermore, there is a feature request for a continuation-passing style API to enable developers to easily encode "send X then receive Y then send Z" message flows (see Issue 58 on GitHub).
• Local Groups & Remote Actors
  Local groups, as returned by calling group::get("local", ...); or group::anonymous(), are now not-so-local. It is possible to send a local group to a remote actor and let the remote actor join the group. Whenever an actor sends a message to the group, the message is send back to the owning process if needed and forwarded to all subscribers from there, including remote actors. This approach certainly does not scale for largely distributed groups, since it is N-times unicast*. However, it paves to path for more use cases of "local" groups and we are working on scalable group communication as well.
  
  * The N in this case is the number of hosts and not the number of remote actors.
  

New Functions in 0.3.3

Among some bugfixes, version 0.3.3 also includes a few new functions to add 'missing' features:

• Forwarding of Messages
  libcppa lacked an easy and transparent way to forward messages. The new function forward_to finally adds this functionality. Furthermore, forwarding a synchronous messages is not possible without this function. Read more about forwarding in Section 5.4 of the manual.
• Messaging with Tuples
  Matthias Vallentin pointed out that the API was somewhat inconsistent, since it did not provide functions to use a tuple as response message. We have added the following functions in version 0.3.3 to treat tuples as first-class citizen: send_tuple, sync_send_tuple, reply_tuple, delayed_send_tuple and delayed_reply_tuple.
• Manual
  The manual is now included to the source distribution as manual.pdf and states the libcppa version.
• Doxygen
  CMake checks whether doxygen is available on your system and adds an optional "doc" target to the Makefile. You can create your own local version of the doxygen documentation by running "make doc". Open the file html/index.html afterwards.