[Hive-users] annoucement of Hive-20000327 devel release

[Raffi K. <ra...@hi...>]

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hello!

whew - what a few months.  after agonizing and optimizing and bug
fixing, the i'm proud to annouce Hive-20000327, our first ever "devel"
release.

we have never released a devel release of hive before, but i feel it
is important to start doing so now as we are starting to make some
fundamental changes to the way hive operates.  please feel free to
download this release and play with it -- if you do, please send us
e-mail about it with your thoughts and suggestions!  and, as always,
we're here to help you guys too.  

the two main changes:

first off, out with RDF in with XML.  thanks to tucker
(tu...@hi...), our resident XML-god, we have removed all RDF
and have gone to a fully XML system.  all descriptions and
configurations for agents and shadows are now -so- much cleaner and
easier to understand.  we have tried to minimize the amount of changes
programmers would see in the API though.  also, the cell configuration
files are now in XML also.

secondly, agent event messaging is now different.  again, we have
tried to minimize the changes seen by the programmer, but in the
background we are no longer using RMI to deliver events except when
necessary.  the problem with RMI is that it is slow and we had a lot
of trouble controlling how many sockets it would open at any time.  i
authored a socket protocol which is allowing us to cache serialization
for speed improvements, and also minimize the amount of sockets hive
uses.

besides this, we have fixed a few random bugs here and there.

what's next?  well - we still have a lot on our plate.  i'm in the
middle of rewriting the agent monitoring agent (the core of inter-cell
management in hive) to make it significantly more robust -- i'm
shooting to have that one in CVS by the end of the week.  haven't
committed it yet because its -really- unstable right now.  tucker and
i are also working on doing a full code review of Cell.java to clean
it up, make it smaller and to work on writing custom class loaders so
we can deal with the class file versioning issue.  on top of this,
tucker is in his own world of trying to do great things with agent
descriptions, and i'm dreaming of ways to get hive security up to par.

rk
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