ANN: Kamaelia 0.6.0, Axon 1.6.0 - New Release

[Michael Sparks]

Hi!


With great pleasure I'd like to announce the release of Kamaelia 0.6.0 and
Axon 1.6.0 :-)

Summary
=======
For the short of time:
    Overview: library/framework for concurrency using message
       passing components as the concurrency metaphor. Consists of a
       kernel (Axon) and collection of components (Kamaelia). Support
       for generator, thread & process based components. Targetted
       towards supporting maintenance, so accessible to novices,
       but general purpose. Uses concurrency to make life simpler,
       not harder. Designed as a practical toolkit.

    Download: http://www.kamaelia.org/GetKamaelia
                   sudo easy_install Kamaelia
                   http://www.kamaelia.org/release/Kamaelia-0.6.0.tar.gz

    Change Summary: Major update, multicore, STM, easy concurrency,
        creation of Kamaelia.Apps namespace for reuse of applications,
        significant amounts of new functionality, major documentation
        improvements (including full offline reference docs), support
        for using Kamaelia components cleanly in non-Kamaelia apps.
        (ie a clean linear -> concurrent interface (Handle))
    Release notes: http://www.kamaelia.org/ReleaseNotes060
    Deltas: Kamaelia 0.5.0 -> 0.6.0, Axon 1.5 -> Axon 1.6.0
    Last full release: October 2006

    Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/kamaelia CHANGED
    New website: http://www.kamaelia.org/Home
    Reference: http://www.kamaelia.org/Components
    Cookbook: http://www.kamaelia.org/Cookbook

Longer version:

What is Kamaelia?
=================

Kamaelia is a library/framework for building systems from simple
components that talk to each other. This is primarily targetted at
aiding maintenance, but also assists in the creation of systems in
the first place. It also means you build naturally concurrent
software. It's intended to be powerful, but also accessible by
any developer, including novices.

We also find it makes it fun to build and work with concurrent systems.

What sort of systems? Network servers, clients, desktop applications,
pygame based games, transcode systems and pipelines, digital TV
systems, spam eradicators, teaching tools, and a fair bit more :)

Whilst it comes out of a research project at BBC Research, it is
designed as a practical toolkit. This clearly affects the set of
components we've created.

In order to do this, Kamaelia is divided into two main namespaces:

    * Axon - this provides the core component & concurrency
      framework.  You use to build components which communicate
      with one another.

    * Kamaelia - this is the collection of components that exist.
      The vast majority of these come from systems created for a
      variety of purposes.

      As of this release, a second major carve up of name spaces
      has been added:

       + Kamaelia.Apps - this is where components from some
         Kamaelia based applications reside. The purpose behind
         this is to provide an experimental staging ground for
         new components to migrate into the main Kamaelia
         namespace. This also means you can use components from
         other Kamaelia applications sooner rather than later. As
         a result, these components may be lacking in two main
         areas - documentation or generality, but putting them
         here allows for components to migrate to a more
         generally useful state.

       + Kamaelia.{anything else} - this is where components will
         migrate to when we are happy with the fact they are
         sufficiently general and useful outside their original
         application.

         It's worth noting that the bulk of components are in
         this category!

What's New & Changed?
=====================

Kamaelia 0.6.0 represent a update over the 0.5.0 release, and should
mark the return to regular releases. (Work has been continuing
constantly since the 0.5.0 release, but numbers of releases slowed)

Major to changes reflected in both Axon & Kamaelia:

   * New home/website :-)
      - http://www.kamaelia.org/Home

   * New getting started page:
      - http://www.kamaelia.org/GetKamaelia

   * Support for easy_install ...
       sudo easy_install Kamaelia

     ... but with caveats that you don't get the docs, tools, or
     examples that way...

   * Large scale documentation improvements

   * Results of nightly documentation generation now included
     in the tar ball.

   * Core autogenerated docs:
      - http://www.kamaelia.org/Docs/Axon/Axon
      - http://www.kamaelia.org/Components

Key changes to Axon - Kamaelia's core:
   * Bumped to version 1.6.0

   * Support for simplified software transactional memory
       - http://www.kamaelia.org/STM
       - if you've never heard/understood the term, think (a bit like)
         "version control for variables"
       - Useful if you MUST share data between components.

   * Experimental multicore support
       - http://www.kamaelia.org/MulticoreExample
       - Largely boils down to put "Process" in front of "Pipeline" to
         make all the subcomponents of the pipeline run in seperate
         processes  
       - Practical benefit for pygame components - it allows multiwindow
         pygame apps.

   * Inheritable default values for component initialisers.
       - The core aim of this is to allow declarative config for
         systems rather than something less clear.
       - This allows you to turn this sort of code:
            def ReusableSocketAddrServer(port=100,
                                   protocol=EchoProtocol):
                return ServerCore(protocol=protocol,
                                  port=port,
                                  socketOptions=(socket.SOL_SOCKET,
                                                 socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1))
       - Into this:
            class ReusableSocketAttrServer(ServerCore):
                socketOptions=(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)

       - Full discussion here:
         http://www.kamaelia.org/InheritableDefaultValues

   * Added in "Handle" support. This provides two key pieces of
     functionality:
     - The ability to run Kamaelia systems in the background, via:
       from Axon.background import background
       background().start()

     - The ability to wrap Kamaelia components or systems in a Handle
       for use in non-Kamaelia systems.
       from Axon.Handle import Handle
       from Kamaelia.Internet.TCPClient import TCPClient

       conn = Handler(TCPClient("www.kamaelia.org", 80)).activate()
       conn.put("GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n", "inbox")
       conn.put("Host: www.kamaelia.org\r\n", "inbox")
       conn.put("\r\n", "inbox")

     - More detail:
       http://www.kamaelia.org/AxonHandle

   * Simplified system shutdown. If you want to close down an entire
Kamaelia based
     system rapidly from inside a component, just do this:

       - self.scheduler.stop()

       - This puts the scheduler into a "shutting down mode" in which:
           - It calls the .stop() method on all the things it's running
           - It then shuts down.

       - The Kamaelia.Internet components take this as an opportunity
         to close all the connections they have open cleanly for example.

       - Example usage: http://tinyurl.com/AxonShutdown

   * Support for WaitComplete extended, allowing better handling of
     more complex protocols which are not stateless in a debuggable
     fashion. It also simplifies working with Pygame, etc.

       - http://www.kamaelia.org/WaitComplete

   * As well as unpausing a component when a message is delivered to
     the component, it gets unpaused when a message is taken from its
     outbox. This allows better synchronous behaviour for rate limited
     in/out-boxes.

Overview of Changes to Kamaelia itself
======================================
Key changes to Kamaelia itself:
   * Creation of the Kamaelia.Apps namespace
   * Shifting of the core code for Kamaelia tools into Kamaelia.Apps
   * Significant numbers of new components
   * Significant number of bugfixes
   * SimpleServer code changed to "ServerCore", representing it's more
     general structure.

In this release there is a slew of extra components and bug fixes, a
variety of new tools - from video shot change detection, through to
SMTP greylisting, but also perhaps the biggest extra: Multiprocess &
hence multicore support (experimental at this stage, but so far so
good :) )

Since even the summary is not a short list of changes, I've left that
summary until after my .sig below.

Platforms
=========

Kamaelia has been used successfully under both Linux, Windows and
Mac OS X. (mostly developed/tested under Linux & Mac OS X)

Where can I get it? & Docs?
===========================

Download:
    http://www.kamaelia.org/GetKamaelia
    http://www.kamaelia.org/release/Kamaelia-0.6.0.tar.gz

Docs:
    http://www.kamaelia.org/Docs/Axon/Axon
    http://www.kamaelia.org/Components
    http://www.kamaelia.org/Cookbook
    http://www.kamaelia.org/MiniAxon

Presentations:
    http://www.slideshare.net/kamaelian

Get involved:
    http://www.kamaelia.org/Developers/
    http://groups.google.com/group/kamaelia *CHANGED MAILING LIST*
    http://code.google.com/p/kamaelia/

Licensing
=========

Kamaelia is released under the Mozilla tri-license scheme
(MPL1.1/GPL2.0/LGPL2.1). See http://www.kamaelia.org/Licensing

Finally, many thanks to everyone who's contributed to this release.

Best Regards,


Michael.
 --
Michael Sparks, Senior Research Engineer, BBC Research
michael.sparks at bbc.co.uk, Kamaelia Project Lead, 
http://www.kamaelia.org/GetKamaelia
BBC Manchester


New files in Kamaelia.*
=======================
This represents significant amounts of new components and new abilities
added into Kamaelia.

Kamaelia/
    Chassis/Seq.py
    Codec/
        WAV.py YUV4MPEG.py
    Device/DVB/
        SoftDemux.py
        Parse/
            { lots of components for working with DVB information
              tables }
    Experimental/
        Chassis.py ERParsing.py
    File/
        MaxSpeedFileReader.py UnixProcess2.py
    Internet/
        TimeOutCSA.py UDP_ng.py
    Protocol/
        MimeRequestComponent.py RecoverOrder.py SDP.py
        SimpleVideoCookieServer.py
        AIM/
            AIMHarness.py ChatManager.py LoginHandler.py OSCARClient.py
        HTTP/
            HTTPRequestHandler.py
        HTTP/
            Handlers/
                Minimal.py SessionExample.py UploadTorrents.py
        IRC/
            IRCClient.py
        RTP/
            NullPayloadPreFramer.py NullPayloadRTP.py RTCPHeader.py
            RTPHeader.py RtpPacker.py RTP.py
    UI/
        Pygame/
            Text.py VideoSurface.py
    Util/
        Collate.py FirstOnly.py Max.py OneShot.py PromptedTurnstile.py
        RangeFilter.py RateChunker.py SequentialTransformer.py Sync.py
        TagWithSequenceNumber.py TwoWaySplitter.py
        Tokenisation/
            Simple.py
    Video/
        PixFormatConversion.py DetectShotChanges.py CropAndScale.py

    Visualisation/ER/
        ERLaws.py ERVisualiserServer.py ExtraWindowFurniture.py
        PAttribute.py PEntity.py PISA.py PRelation.py

    XML/SimpleXMLParser.py

    Support/
        OscarUtil2.py OscarUtil.py
        DVB/DateTime.py
        Protocol/IRC.py

New files in Kamaelia.Apps
==========================
Functionality in here represents code that can be standardised for use
in other apps if there's a desire to do so. Many of these components are
reuseable in their current form, though may have limitations.

Kamaelia/Apps/
    Compose/
        BuildViewer.pyCodeGen.py GUI.py PipeBuild.py PipelineWriter.py
        GUI/
            ArgumentsPanel.py BuilderControlsGUI.py TextOutputGUI.py
    Games4Kids/
        BasicSprite.py MyGamesEventsComponent.py SpriteScheduler.py
    Grey/
        ConcreteMailHandler.py GreyListingPolicy.py MailHandler.py
        PeriodicWakeup.py Support.py WakeableIntrospector.py
    Whiteboard/
        Audio.py Canvas.py CheckpointSequencer.py CommandConsole.py
        Entuple.py Options.py Painter.py Palette.py Router.py
        Routers.py SingleShot.py TagFiltering.py Tokenisation.py
        TwoWaySplitter.py UI.py
    IRCLogger/Support.py
    Show/GraphSlides.py

Deleted files in Kamaelia.*
===========================
A number of files which were deprecated in the last release have been
deleted from this release. (See full release notes for details)

Changed files in Kamaelia.*
===========================
Largely small improvements, changes to meta data about components,
often major documentation improvements - see full release notes for
details. Occasional bugfixes. Largest overall change to existing
files is improvement of documentation, REsT fixes, and addition of
metadata to files.

Kamaelia/
    Audio/
        Filtering.py RawAudioMixer.py
        Codec/PyMedia/
            Decoder.py Encoder.py
        PyMedia/
            Input.py Output.py Resample.py
    Chassis/
        Carousel.py ConnectedServer.py Graphline.py Pipeline.py
        Prefab.py
    Codec/
        Dirac.py RawYUVFramer.py Speex.py
    Device/
        DVB/
            Core.py DemuxerService.py EIT.py NowNext.py PSITables.py
            Receiver.py Tuner.py
    File/
        BetterReading.py ReadFileAdaptor.py Reading.py UnixProcess.py
    Internet/
        ConnectedSocketAdapter.py Selector.py SingleServer.py
        TCPClient.py TCPServer.py UDP.py
    Protocol/
        EchoProtocol.py FortuneCookieProtocol.py Framing.py
        SimpleReliableMulticast.py
        HTTP/
            ErrorPages.py HTTPClient.py HTTPHelpers.py HTTPParser.py
            HTTPResourceGlue.py HTTPServer.py IcecastClient.py
            MimeTypes.py
        Torrent/
            TorrentClient.py TorrentMaker.py TorrentPatron.py
            TorrentService.py
    UI/
        GraphicDisplay.py
        OpenGL/
            Button.py Movement.py SimpleTranslationInteractor.py
            OpenGLComponent.py
        Pygame/
            Button.py Display.py Image.py KeyEvent.py Multiclick.py
            Ticker.py VideoOverlay.py
    Util/
        Backplane.py Chooser.py Chunkifier.py ChunkNamer.py Clock.py
        Comparator.py ConsoleEcho.py Console.py DataSource.py Fanout.py
        Filter.py Introspector.py MarshallComponent.py Marshalling.py
        NullSink.py PassThrough.py PureTransformer.py RateFilter.py
        Splitter.py Stringify.py UnseenOnly.py
    Visualisation/
        Axon/
            AxonVisualiserServer.py ExtraWindowFurniture.py
            PComponent.py
        PhysicsGraph/
            TopologyViewer.py TopologyViewerServer.py chunks_to_lines.py
            GridRenderer.py lines_to_tokenlists.py RenderingParticle.py

Kamaelia/Experimental/Services.py
Kamaelia/Automata/Behaviours.py

Kamaelia/Support/
    Deprecate.py
    DVB/
        CRC.py Descriptors.py
    Data/
        bitfieldrec.py Experimental.py Repository.py
    Particles/
        SpatialIndexer.py