Sep 2004
16/09/04: Version 0.9.2-beta2 of wicker has been released. This release adds a new jdbc-based caching mechanism, tidies up the etc directory, adds a new jython console system, plus assorted bug fixes. The download is available here.
May 2004
28/05/04: Version 0.9.1 of wicker has been released. This release adds provisional (not fully completed) support for stateful session beans, broadcast and reliable multicast messaging and various other improvements. The app server has been considerably modified so that beans are now pooled using Jakarta's pooling library. Download is available here.
March 2004
30/03/04: A patch is needed for the 0.9.0 release of wicker, to ensure that transaction support works properly (it doesn't at the moment). Get more details for the fix here. This patch will be included in release 0.9.1 (which also includes provisional support for stateful session beans). Coming soon.
February 2004
06/02/04: Wicker version 0.9.0 (beta) released -- now with extra scripting goodness! Wicker 0.9 adds a new configuration/deployment mechanism using the excellent Jython, most components are now 'pluggable', and various other changes as listed in the release notes.
Work is currently in progress on improving the messaging service/distributed cache.
January 2004
12/01/04: Wicker 0.8.2 has been released. Ver 0.8.2 adds a new (simplified) xml invocation mechanism for deployment of services.
ADDENDUM: we're replacing this already (in the forthcoming 0.9.0 release) with python (jython) scripts because of flexibility issues
with XML invocation (and because it seems like a stupid idea to have to write a complete scripting 'language' in XML when there are already perfectly good scripting engines out there). The codebase has been tidied up again (a number of unnecessary (poorly named) files have been replaced or removed), and startup is a lot cleaner. Look for 0.9.0 in the next week or so.
December 2003
23/12/03: The transaction error has been resolved with release 0.8.1a of wicker. Rather than replacing the bundled transaction manager, we have made a modification to the way EJBs are 'looked up' within the system. An EJB calling another EJB, now uses a local call, rather than using JNDI/RMI, and therefore does not initiate a separate thread (see the release notes for 0.8.1a for more information). This means that (as before) transactions do not work across VM boundaries (which meets our usage criteria, in any case).
08/12/03: There is a problem with the transaction manager in wicker at the moment -- transactions do not get passed from one ejb call to a subsequent (inner) ejb call (i.e. one ejb calling another). JNP server seems to launch all RMI method calls in their own separate thread -- meaning the threadlocal data used by the transaction manager will contain nothing on a subsequent ejb call (and therefore another transaction is created). Replacing the basic transaction manager, bundled with wicker, was always on the agenda, so we will now be looking at (perhaps) the products included with jetty plus -- with some modifications to the way local EJB calls are treated in the system.