Release Notes for snapshot 971112                 - By Sai-Lai Lo
---------------------------------

A snapshot of the current omniORB development tree is now available for
download at:

   http://www.uk.research.att.com/omniORB/snapshots/snapshot_971112.tar.gz

This should be considered a pre-release of 2.4.0. 

The distribution has been tested on Solaris 2.5/SunPro C++ 4.2, x86
Linux/gcc-2.7.2 and Digital Unix 3.2/DEC C++ 5.5. So if you are using these
platforms, I would say it is robust enough to give it a test drive with
your real applications.

For all the Windows NT and 95 fans out there, you just have to wait a bit
longer until I can run all my test cases on that platform. The good news is
the idl compiler- omniidl2 now produces stubs that do not need patching up
to work around the MSVC++ nested class bug.

However, we still have a few steps to go before the final release of
2.4.0. To achieve that, we need some help:

1. If you are using egcc, please compiling the snapshot and run the
   testsuite (see below).

2. I have merged in the ports to the following platforms:
      AIX 4.2/IBM's C++ (version?)
      HPUX 10.20/aCC (version ?)
      m68k NextStep 3.3/gcc-2.7.2

   Please give it a try and run the testsuite. The ports were done with
   2.2.0. I may have missed out something in the merge. 

   I'll merge in the ports to OpenVMS and Irix later.

3. If you are using other ORBs, please test for interoperability.
   In particular, I want to know which ORB fails to handle orderly shutdown
   of an IIOP connection by the server side. One of the new feature in
   2.4.0 is the auto-shutdown of idle IIOP connections. The ORB uses the
   IIOP close connection message to do this. The client side should not
   report this as a COMM_FAILURE.


To verify that a port is working properly and a build with a new compiler
is correct, please run the testsuite I bundled in the snapshot. The file
NOTES_TO_TESTERS in the snapshot provides the detail on how to go about
doing the testing.

A final note, this snapshot and the future releases will be distributed
with a slightly modified version of our own build environment. This is to
make it much easier to produce snapshots. The build environment is GNUmake
based and is intended for building multiple targets from a single source
repository.

This snapshot contains all the features I listed in my previous posting of
the upcoming 2.4.0. I've attached the posting below.


Sai-Lai



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(1) Release omniORB_2.4.0

    I want to get this release out of the door as soon as I can. I still
    have some more testing to do before I'm satisfied to release it both
    internally and externally.

    This (long overdued?) release will include:

NEW  - workaround MSVC++ nested class bug

     - fixes to all the bugs discovered since 2.2.0

     - Proper support for late binding.
         Given interface A and B inherits from A and a process which only
         has the stub for interface A linked in. With 2.2.0, if the process
         expects a A but receives an object reference for a B, it would not
         know B is A. With 2.4.0, it will know by using the _is_a()
         operation to find out if B is indeed A.
 
     - Cache connection shutdown doesn't cause a COMM_FAILURE.

     - Connections are closed automatically after they are idle for a
       period of time. The idle period can be controlled by the
       application. This check is done both at the client and the server
       end.

     - Proper BOA shutdown. It is even restartable.

     - Support for life cycle service. This provides all the hooks to
       implement object migration.

     - omniORB specific extensions to allow applications to install
       per-object or global exception handlers to deal with
       CORBA::TRANSIENT, CORBA::COMM_FAILURE and CORBA::SystemException
       (other than the previous 2) raised during remote object invocation.

     - more examples, including sample code that demonstrate
       interoperability with some java ORBs.

     - New ports:

	OpenVMS  - by Bruce Visscher
        Irix 6.x - by Hans Heubner
        AIX      - by Andrey Slepuhin and Gary Duzan
        x86 Solaris
        


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