Announcing the release of Galaxy Communicator-4.0

We are especially pleased and relieved to announce the release of Galaxy Communicator version 4.0. Except for a couple minor bug fixes, this release is identical to Galaxy Communicator version 4.0rc1.

Version 4.0 is an optional upgrade, although we believe that many sites will find it valuable. The upgrade process from version 3.3 is almost completely transparent, and should involve no modifications for the vast majority of users. We will be following up the 4.0 release with an updated release of the Open Source Toolkit (OSTK).

The 4.0 release features a number of significant enhancements, including:

• Broker proxies. We've introduced a simpler, more powerful, more reliable brokering API which we strongly encourage everyone to upgrade to. In this API, broker information is encapsulated into a distinguished object which includes type information as well as broker contact information. The old broker API remains, and will be supported alongside the new one.
• Timestamps. Communicator message traffic is now timestamped in the Hub, and the information is available to servers.
• Provider names. The Hub now supports explicit references to named service providers, for all sorts of purposes.
• Hub GUI API. We have now documented the message API for external Hub visualization tools. We will distribute an extensive example in the Open Source Toolkit.
• Better thread support. Some of our users have spent considerable time and effort using the infrastructure in multithreaded C servers, and we've significantly improved the reliability of the core library in these contexts.
• Improved C client API. It is now straightforward to build a single connection which connects to the Hub (added since 4.0beta1).
• Complete Win32 port. The entire distribution now works on Win32 (tested on NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 Professional), including all the examples, the toy travel demo, the tutorial, and the MITRE stdin polling utility (added since 4.0beta2).

The GalaxyCommunicator 4.0 distribution comes with extensive documentation (see docs/index.html), a detailed list of new features (see docs/new_features.html), and an upgrade guide for 3.3 installations to 4.0 (see docs/4point0upgrade.html).

Please direct all bug report to the GalaxyCommunicator Bug Tracker on Sourceforge.

The GalaxyCommunicator and OSTK releases are open source distributions. They are available at http://communicator.sourceforge.net/download.

Samuel Bayer
For the Communicator team

Last modified: 10 September 2002