[Prevayler-coders] Planning for Prevayler 2.4

[Justin T. S. <ju...@kr...>]

Howdy Coders,

I'd like to push for a release in the next month or two. I have modest
goals, focused on requests that have come across the mailing list in
the past several months, including a couple of submitted patches. See
below for a list. I'll leave some of my more controversial ideas (such
as exception handling and other internal rearchitecting) for later.

By the way, Java 1.4 is officially dead as of yesterday:
http://java.sun.com/products/archive/eol.policy.html

None of the features I have in mind will require Java 5.0, so it
doesn't matter much for this release. I'll go ahead and keep Prevayler
2.4 compatible with Java 1.4, but I expect to ignore Java 1.4
compatibility immediately after this release.

I plan to build and test Prevayler 2.4 using Java 5.0 on Mac OS X and
also test using Java 1.4, Java 5.0, and Java 6 on Linux. I would
expect to drop Java 1.4 and add Java 7 on Linux for testing subsequent
releases.

Here are the features I have in mind:

1. Don't hang the system when there's an IOException from the journal.
Prevayler should certainly stop handling requests, but should throw an
exception rather than hanging every thread that calls into it.
(Requested by Graham Barr on August 13. I already implemented this a
while ago -- commit e219167 on the "cleanup" branch -- so I just need
to merge it back into the "master" branch.)

2. Return the file location of the snapshot from takeSnapshot().
(Patch submitted by William Pietri on April 17.)

3. Provide an API for cleaning up old journal files. (Requested by
Steven Benjamin on April 15.)

4. Read snapshot #0 on startup if it exists. (Requested by Achint
Srivastava on June 24.)

5. Fix an issue with serialization in Java 6 when a classloader is
specified. (Patch submitted by Tony Cabot on April 15.)

Cheers,
Justin