[Communicator-user] Release of 3.2beta2

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

[Apologies if you get this message more than once; I'm trying to cover
as many lists as possible, and they have considerable overlap.]

All - 

OK, we lied. We thought that there would be only one beta for 3.2, but
after fixing some hidden but long-standing bugs (thanks to MIT for
their help, among others), we are, as usual, pleased and relieved to
announce the availability of the second beta of Galaxy Communicator
3.2, 3.2beta2.

In addition to bug fixes, version 3.2 includes a major enhancement of
the documentation, featuring a self-contained, self-guided tutorial on
the Galaxy Communicator infrastructure. This tutorial is a completely
updated and reorganized version of the Galaxy Communicator course
which has been taught at MITRE in the past. We've redesigned this
course to be more consistent, easier to run, and easier to
understand. We have also made a number of improvements to supporting
tools, most significantly the unit test utility, which is now a
powerful graphical tool. It allows you to connect to a Hub pretending
to be a server, or to a server pretending to be a Hub, and its
graphical interface allows you to respond to incoming messages and to
send new messages of your own, and keeps a mouseable history. Due to
its dependence on Python, the new tutorial is not yet available on
Windows, but should be in the next major release (4.0).

This beta is functionally complete, and we anticipate no software
changes before the final release of 3.2, scheduled for the beginning
of November. The upgrade from 3.1 should be transparent for all but a
tiny minority of users. The beta differs from the final release in the
following ways:

o As in the final version, the PDF documentation is available via a
  separate download, due to its expanded size. However, its appearance
  is still being tweaked.

o Time permitting, we will finally update the Python and
  Allegro binding documentation, which is somewhat stale.

The GalaxyCommunicator 3.2beta2 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 3.1
installations to 3.2 (see docs/3point2upgrade.html).

Upgrade assistance and guidance is also available at
bug...@li.... Please direct all bugs, as usual, to
bug...@li...; please do not send mail directly to
members of the Communicator team.

The GalaxyCommunicator 3.2beta2 release is an open source
distribution. It is available at
http://communicator.sourceforge.net/download.

Samuel Bayer 
For the Communicator team