[Communicator-user] Announcing the release of Galaxy Communicator 3.3beta1 and OSTK 20020125

[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 - 

We are especially pleased and relieved to announce the release of
Galaxy Communicator version 3.3beta1, as well as the first release of
the Open Source Toolkit (OSTK), version 20020125. This is an optional
upgrade, although we believe that many sites will find it
valuable. The upgrade process from version 3.2 is almost completely
transparent, and should involve no modifications for the vast majority
of users.

The purpose of the 3.3 release is twofold. First, we're introducing
the OSTK, which is initially populated with servers moved over from
the Galaxy Communicator distribution as well as some previously
unreleased servers. Second, we've finally converted the configuration
process for Galaxy Communicator to rely entirely on GNU configure,
which has allowed us to test and the distribution on a number of
auxiliary platforms, including MacOS X 10.1, SGI IRIX, and Intel
FreeBSD. We have also improved cross-compilation in this process, and
can now report that we have sucessfully run cross-compiled
Communicator-compliant servers on iPaq Linux. Other improvements:

o New support in the Hub for Hub continuations, which allow the
  programmer to treat incoming new messages as replies  
o Significant speed enhancements 
o New Builtin server functions hub_set_verbosity, hub_raise_error 
o Numerous bug fixes 

This beta should be the only beta for Galaxy Communicator 3.3; the
code has been frozen internally for a number of weeks now.

We intend to provide revisions of the Open Source Toolkit as the
various servers improve and new servers and wrappers become available,
so you can expect more frequent releases of the toolkit. Each server
in the toolkit will be marked with its own version history, so you can
track changes individually as you upgrade.

The GalaxyCommunicator 3.3 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 3.2
installations to 3.3 (see docs/3point3upgrade.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 3.3 and OSTK 20020125 releases are open source
distributions. They are available at
http://communicator.sourceforge.net/download.

Samuel Bayer 
For the Communicator team