Projected timetable of 4Suite releases
1.0a4: November 2004
- Repository test suite update
1.0b1: December or January 2004
- Some cDomlette refactoring
- Documentation work
- Fix FTP write
- fixed Dashboard
- Another bug sweep
1.0b2: January 2004
- More documentation work
- Another bug sweep
- Some security review
1.0rc1: February 2004
Then 1.0 final as experience with release candidates warrants.
The server-rewrite for performance is deferred to 4Suite 1.1
Earlier, preparatory thoughts
4Suite has been in development or several years, now, and version 1.0 is approaching. Here are some thoughts on the roadap to 1.0 and beyond.
See the threads A significant boost for 4Suite development and Straight to 1.0? for initial discussion of the priorities for 1.0 development. Some highlights:
- Heavy work and testing on stability
- Heavy work on documentation
- Performance. An informal target is for 4Suite 1.0 to be able to handle 1,000,000 documents with reasonable performance running on $1000 hardware. See this thread for some dicussion.
- Security review for network servers
- sweep of all reported bugs
- Easier packaging and release process
- Better logging, e.g. see feature requst (FR) 663564: cleaner logging of bad RPC cmds/responses
- FR 639778: webDAV
- FR 639779: Full text search
- FR 639752: Postgres Partial Index
See Mike Brown's pretty good summary of current work towards 1.0 as of May 2003.
4Suite 1.0 will offer API stability and support going forward (in versions 1.1, 1.2, etc.). We hope to be able to donate any of the library code that's wanted to PyXML (in particular 4XPath and 4XSLT). The main obstacle will be our heavy use of C (directly and through BisonGen).
We will also start on a clean-room refactoring for 4Suite 2.0, which will offer similar core focus and capabilities to 1.0, but will be designed with performance and some key features wired into the architecture. These include:
- A brand new XSLT processor that works by compiling to byte-code
- Better Python/XML data binding support
- Redesigned network interfaces and APIs
- CORBA support