What's coming - 2006-10

I thought I would let you know of what is coming in Seagull before the end of October '06.

* TLS transport: this has been added end of September in the source repository and will be officially released
* SIP support: As a complement to SIPp, Seagull will support also SIP to allow mixed SIP/DIAMETER/XCAP scenarios
* Uniform distribution: some users have noticed that new scenario attempts are not placed evenly within the second (10 scenario per seconds is not one scenario every 10th of the second). The new version provides a uniform distribution of the calls
* Poisson distribution: a contribution from Vincent Planat provides a Poisson distribution for the scenarios. It is aimed at emulating real networks by adding "randomness".
* Evolution on distributions: because of the 2 changes mentioned, distributions are now more opened and more scenario distributions can be easily added
* Actions: As a performance improvement, actions are now derived from a base action object. This allows to create new action very easily - with a limited understanding of Seagull's code
* Programmatic control: Seagull can be remote controlled using a very simple http interface. With a single http request, you can change the scenario rate (immediately or following a ramp), dump Seagull's counters or quit. This allows to create GUIs, Eclipse plugins or Seagull clusters very easily.
* Programmatic scripting: Using the new programmatic control interface, a simple Perl script is provided (as an example) to sequence a series of actions. A script, as parsed by this Perl program (launched with "./ctrl.pl http://192.168.0.2:10055/ scenario.txt") looks like:

WAIT 5S
SET RATE 20
WAIT 1M
SET RATE 40
DUMP
RAMP 100 IN 10S

If useful, the scripting language could be extended

I'm quite excited about all those features, and I am sure we will have the occasion to discuss all that on the mailing list when it comes out!