[Communicator-user] Announcing Galaxy Communicator 3.0beta1

[Samuel L. B. <sa...@li...>]

All -

We are, as usual, pleased and relieved to announce the availability of
Galaxy Communicator 3.0beta1. Version 3.0 has been under development
since late summer, and this beta contains almost all the features
we'll have time to wedge into the 3.0 distribution. Even though the
internals of the infrastructure have changed in some major ways, the
upgrade from 2.1 to 3.0 will be quite simple for the great majority of
users. Version 3.0 features:

- Vastly improved tools for managing simultaneous sessions

- More flexible and robust Hub-server interaction, including the
  introduction of continuations and the elimination of deadlocks 

- Support for server location files, which help maintain consistent
  port location information across Hub and servers 

- Many infrastructure improvements, including cross-language support
  for distinguishing among Galaxy Communicator versions, improved
  timed task control, and a consistent, event-driven programming model
  for embedding the Galaxy Communicator library

- Improvements in the frame library, including support for dynamically
  expandable lists and arrays, better memory management options, and
  access to the full range of Communicator types as frame fills

- More flexibility in the Hub syntax and organization, including
  better management of servers and service types, new support for
  choosing among available servers, and an alternative syntax which
  provides a wider array of control options and eliminates some of the
  idiosyncracies in the default syntax 

- A completely revised communications protocol, including XDR encoding
  for all brokering and message traffic and better encapsulation of
  administrative information

- Significant brokering improvements, including access to the full
  range of Communicator types for brokering and automatic support for
  multiple subscribers for outgoing brokers

- A PDF version of the HTML documentation (thanks to
  http://www.easysw.com and their open source conversion tool!)

We anticipate a beta testing period of approximately one month, during
which we will make a few final enhancements and test the
infrastructure extensively. Please direct all bugs, as usual, to
bug...@li...; please do not send mail directly to
members of the Communicator team.

The GalaxyCommunicator 3.0beta1 distribution comes with extensive
documentation (see docs/index.html), a detailed list of new features
(see docs/new_features.html), and an upgrade guide for 2.1
installations to 3.0beta1 (see docs/3point0upgrade.html). 

The GalaxyCommunicator 3.0beta1 release is an open source
distribution. It is available at http://fofoca.mitre.org/download.

Samuel Bayer
For the Communicator team

P.S. MIT Galaxy users: The MIT Galaxy system will not compile against
Galaxy Communicator 3.0beta1 without minor modifications. MITRE has a
set of working patches, which we've forwarded to MIT for further
testing. We have not yet discussed with MIT which one of MIT or MITRE
will be supporting this upgrade. If you have questions, feel free to
contact me directly (sa...@mi...).