Wink releases Hydro-0.6

[Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

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here is a shortened version with all marketing language removed.

Gerd

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Hi list,

Wink Technologies, Inc., the makers of the soon-to-be-famous people
search engine (http://wink.com), have just released a new version of the Hydro
library, which is an implementation of the ICE protocol.

This version adds support for servers, and also includes a lot of bug fixes.

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Hydro is an independent implementation of ICE, the object-oriented RPC
protocol by ZeroC, for the O'Caml programming language. This is an
early, not yet complete release, but the code is already stable and
usable. 

For the full story, see the README in the distribution.

*** Features ***

      * Support for clients (proxies) and servers
      * The whole ICE type system is implemented, and can be marshalled.
        This includes graphs of objects.
      * The whole ICE type system can be mapped to O'Caml types. The
        mapping is quite flexible and configurable, e.g. you can choose
        whether you prefer arrays or lists as representations of ICE
        sequences. Where necessary, the properties of the ICE type
        system are emulated. For example, hydrogen generates special
        code for downcasts of objects.
      * IDL files are dynamically represented at runtime
      * The runtime supports both asynchronous and synchronous method
        invocation
      * The runtime can be integrated with other libraries that also
        base on Ocamlnet's event queues, e.g. with Ocamlnet's HTTP
        clients, or SunRPC.
      * Fully automatic connection management
      * The generated code is properly indented
      * Liberal license conditions

*** Restrictions ***

      * Hydro only supports twoway calls over TCP for now
      * Hydro does not support separate compilation (i.e. you cannot
        split an .ice file into several parts, hydrogen every part
        alone, and then merge them later). This is a fundamental
        restriction we'll never be able to improve.
      * There is no support for Slice checksums
      * There is no support for checked proxy casts (will follow
        soon)
      * There is no support for configuration files
      * There is no support for stringified proxies and endpoints
      * The runtime and the generated language mapping layer are both
        reentrant. However, there is no specific support for
        multi-threaded programming beyond this
      * There is no support for compression
      * Except of calling the locator service of IceGrid, there is no
        support for add-on technologies like IceGrid, Freeze, etc. We
        have some interest in IceGrid, so this may also follow at some
        time.

[... rest of README omitted...]

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Download, and documentation
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Download link: http://oss.wink.com/hydro/

Manual:  http://oss.wink.com/hydro/hydro-0.6/doc/html/index.html

A GODI package godi-hydro exists.

For general information about ICE, see ZeroC's homepage:
http://zeroc.com


Gerd
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Gerd Stolpmann * Viktoriastr. 45 * 64293 Darmstadt * Germany 
gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de          http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
Phone: +49-6151-153855                  Fax: +49-6151-997714
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