The new
dispatch provides a fully asynchronous implementation with a clean futures based API. The documentation is very clear and provides a very useful discussion of how best to handle failures.
However, the implementation contains its own unique implementation of futures. This was undoubtedly motivated by a desire to minimize dependencies.
The next release of Scala (2.10) will contain a standard Futures implementation. Hopefully there will be a corresponding refresh of dispatch.
No problem arises if dispatch is a point solution, without reference to other libraries.
Some competitors to dispatch would be
spray which directly uses Akka and
play which does not. The latter is ironic given that both fall under the Typesafe banner! Play does provide standard mechanism to reference Akka futures.