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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 14:52:21 -0400
From: Berin Loritsch <bloritsch@apache.org>
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To: announce@jakarta.apache.org, announce@xml.apache.org,
        general@jakarta.apache.org, general@xml.apache.org,
        cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org
Subject: Excalibur 4.0b4 Released
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Avalon Excalibur 4.0b4 Released
-------------------------------
 The Avalon team is proud to announce the 4.0b4 beta
 release of the Avalon Excalibur.

About Avalon
------------
 The Avalon project is Apache's Java Server Framework.
 It is separated into five sub projects: Framework,
 Excalibur, LogKit, Cornerstone, and Phoenix.
 Its purpose is to simplify server side programming
 for Java based projects. It formalizes serveral
 best of breed practices and patterns for server side
 programming.

For more information about Avalon, please go to
http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon

About Avalon Excalibur 4.0b4
----------------------------
 Avalon Excalibur contains several premade Avalon
 Components and utilities to make your server side
 programming easier. There are several pool implementations,
 Component management implementations, and database
 management implementations.

 We highly recommend upgrading to this version of Excalibur,
 as it fixes a race condition in its pools that only manifested
 under extreme loads.  It also improves performance of the
 pooling code tremendously.  Lastly, there is direct support
 for Informix's Connection Pooling code using Excalibur's
 DataSourceComponent approach.

For more information about Avalon Excalibur 4.0b4, please go to
http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/excalibur

ChangeLog for Avalon Excalibur 4.0b4

*)  Fixed race condition brought to my attention by Tom
 Klaasen. His excellent analysis of the problem enabled
 me to not only fix the race condition but also increase
 the efficiency of the pool in some cases by 200% [BL]

*)  Added new InformixDataSource that uses the Informix
 JDBC 2.2 driver and Cadastre to provide pooled connections
 from Informix. Unfortunately the drivers do not
 yet support transactions. I need to look further
 into this, as it might be a server configuration issue
 as opposed to a driver issue. [BL]

*)  Fixed errors in utilities discovered by the tests. [BL]

*)  Converted tests from Testlet to JUnit. [BL]

*)  Fixed the build structure so that everything builds
 correctly. [BL]

*)  Added extra convenience methods to discover if a
 component exists. [BL]

*)  Added stylesheet to convert Stylebook markup to
 DocBook markup. [BL]

*)  Changed the documentation build process to use Cocoon
 to build the site. [BL]

*)  Add new configuration element "driver" to JdbcDataSource
 so that the class is loaded in the current context
 classloader when the component is first set up. [BL]

*)  Optimize all logging functions to make it easier
 for JVMs to decide whether or not to concatenate strings
 for log messages. [BL]

*)  Extensive reworking of the excalibur.i18n package
 (XML Resource bundles). [NP]

*)  Extensive additions to IOUtils so that it accepts
 numerous different stream/writer types. Also will
 convert streams to strings using a specific encoder
 or else by using default platform encoder. [JT]

*)  Added EndianUtil to excalibur.io to help when need
 to work with little endian data. [PD]

*)  Added "ROLE" attribute to DataSource--to comply
 with practices outlined in whitepaper. [BL]


Downloads for Avalon Excalibur 4.0b4 available at 

http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-avalon/release/excalibur/latest

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