SNA Projects Blog

In sync with our plan for regular monthly releases, we’re excited to announce release of version 0.60. Downloads are available, you may browse the updated Javadoc or view the release notes.

In addition to bug fixes, several important new features and enhancements have made it into this release:

• Admin Client/Server API: intended for functionality which is required, but should be used sparingly (if at all), at the application level. This adds support for retrieval and update of metadata on remote nodes as well as streaming of keys and key/value pairs from one node to another.
• EC2 testing: a distributed system requires tests which involve multiple machines, contributed by Kirk True. Amazon’s EC2 web service allows us to provision and de-provision nodes programatically. The EC2 Testing Infrastructure allows for such tests to run on a regular basis along with other automated tests.
• Support for large lists and strings in the JSON serializer. Previously, the binary JSON serialization format limited us to maximum size of 32,768 for strings and lists (i.e. the maximum value of a signed 16-bit integer). The maximum size of a list or string is now 1,073,741,823 bytes.
• Experimental support for views. Views allow for computation to be moved close to the data. Suppose, for example, that we’re storing a serialized list as a value in a key/value pair and would like to append a single element. Normally, we’d have to transfer the entire list to the client, append the element, then transfer the modified list to the client. Views would mean a “put” operation now becomes a proxy for append a value to the list directly on the client. Note, this is feature is experimental, we can’t make any guarantees about the stability or performance of this feature; in addition, the API is also subject to change.
• Support for LZF compression, contributed by Ismael Juma and Tatu Saloranta.
• Interpolation search for read-only stores.
• A client for the Ruby programming language (using an experimental ruby protocol buffers gem), contributed by Claudio Cherubino.