7 Replies Latest reply on Dec 31, 2004 12:59 PM by acoliver

    Milestone 2 imminent

    acoliver

      I've scaled back the M2 release. I want to get out a stable release before we add any more features to the mix. M3 is still being figured out so don't take the roadmap (on the wiki) too seriously until we figure out what the new resource allocation is (or how many volunteers will step forward once we put out a stable release).

      Right now M2 is stable, I run it for my mail server. It took a long time to get that way, primarily because of MySQL and my server not having enough memory. Once I got MySQL running in innodb mode and using long blobs, thigns stabilized. Of course now with a bum hard drive thats prone to change.

      There is still one critical bug that I haven't determined whose fault. We seem to get random crap characters in the messages (='s mostly) which I suppose is some form of escape sequence. I'm not sure that this isn't somehow related to my mail client. Once I make some determination here, then we'll move forward with that.

      The HEAD (soon to be M2) has been tested with JBoss 4.0.0 and works just fine (with a few changes I had to make for SSLContext).

      There is plenty to do and we're actively recruiting volunteers ATM. Please step forward and I'll assign you something to do (or pick it yourself if you have a particular area of interest).

      -Andy

        • 1. Re: Milestone 2 imminent
          acoliver

          With Kabir's help I proved that the bug is actually somehow in Entourage. It doesn't happen on his side, and doesn't happen with Thunderbird. So we should be go for M2 shortly.

          • 2. Re: Milestone 2 imminent
            iwadasn


            Good to hear. Once a stable release is out, I'll try it on my server and give some feedback at least. I plan to try it with HSQL and Cloudbase (now Derby), hardly a production ready rig, but it should do for what I need.

            If you get out a stable release and have a nice list of things that need to be done, I'll at least check out the list and see if there's anything I think I can tackle without needing to spend two weeks reading the code.

            At work, our Exchange servers just went down in flames, and I'm sure the IT guys are very upset, so there's certainly an opportunity here, though not until the system is more advanced than it currently is, but all in good time.

            • 3. Re: Milestone 2 imminent
              acoliver

              HSQL meaning Hypersonic? The problem is that Hypersonic stores everything in memory. That is simply not feasible for email! (or at least not with the sizes of mail that I get ;-) ) Yes I speak from experience ;-)

              HEAD is pretty much what I will be calling M2. Right now I'm working on an install tool. I could use some help creating configurations for databases other than MySQL. (Though I want to discourage people from using HSQL because they won't like the result at all).

              Yes, I realize that M2 isn't going to be an exchange replacement :-) Its way to early for that. The culmination of 2-3 man months of effort from maybe an average total of 1.5 persons is not going to wipe out Exchange. Mainly get the snowball rolling and start the initial momentum.

              -Andy

              • 4. Re: Milestone 2 imminent
                freddt

                HSQLDB doesn't store everything in memory when CACHED tables are used. You can currently store up to 2GB per database. The limit is due to rise to 8GB in the next version due by April (this is a real date as it is tied with the release of OpenOffice.org 2.00). So you will be able to start with HSQLDB for smaller setups and let users move to whichever RDBMS they use in house for larger deployments.

                Fred Toussi
                Maintainer, HSQLDB Project

                • 5. Re: Milestone 2 imminent
                  acoliver

                  I dunno a whole big amount about HSQL's various config options, but what is in JBoss now crashed ever few days when I used it. MySQL, once I figured out the BLOB issues, works wonderfully (except for my hard drive which is spitting out bad blocks every few days but that is scheduled to be fixed tomorrow/friday). HSQL is a "nice to have" I guess for testing it out, but unless someone proves sufficently to my satisfaction that it can work stabilly and painlessly, I'll always put a disclaimer. Its not personal, just thus far HSQL hasn't held up well for me and one thing I pretty nearly always have to do for JBoss consulting customers is switch them off of it for JMS (for some reason this is often missed -- you'd be surpised at the number of large companies that inadvertantly use it in production).

                  -Andy

                  • 6. Re: Milestone 2 imminent
                    freddt

                    It probably hit the 2GB limit :) The newer versions of HSQLDB (1.7.2 and 1.7.3) have a DEFRAG function which is not used in the JBoss configuration.

                    I had not investigated the JBoss usage pattern until very recently. I'm currently working with some real test data from a live JBoss instance and will make space management automatic in the next version. The upshot will be that you can use an embedded HSQLDB database in a production server without any crash.

                    In any case, people will use an RDBMS that fits their needs / policies, so we'll just try to make HSQLDB better in this usage scenario.

                    Fred

                    • 7. Re: Milestone 2 imminent
                      acoliver

                      Cool. Once M2 is out, it'd be really helpful if you could help add a config for HSQL that makes sense. I'm hoping to put M2 out right after the first of the year. I'm working on GUI installation right now.