Large Hadron Collider

A few more minutes, and CERN, which already was the coolest place on the planet because it's where the Web was born , will be literally the coolest place on the planet when they switch on the Large Hadron Collider and start pumping out those man made black holes.

Helma at the 2008 OpenExpo in Zurich

Last week I presented Helma at the OpenExpo in Zurich , where Helma and FreeBSD happened to be neighbors, which reminds me to point out that there is now a FreeBSD port of Helma thanks to decke's efforts .

Release Candidate 1 of Helma 1.6.3

The Helma 1.6.3rc1 release candidate contains numerous bug fixes and many minor improvements, such as support for secure HttpOnly session cookies, logging improvements, several changes to the way file paths to different resources are resolved, and Helma is now again backwards compatible with Java 1.4, to mention just a few.

Our bugzilla has a list of bugs fixed in Helma 1.6.3 .

• Relative repository paths now resolve relative to Helma home directory, fixing bug 639.
• Introduced hopdir servlet parameter to be able to set the helma directory.
• The location of db.properties is now customizable using the dbPropFile server property, fixing bug 640
• Fixed bug with closed database connections in very long running requests by making sure connections are re-checked every 10 seconds.
• Changed HopObject.getOrderedView() to return a transient HopObject instead of a ListViewWrapper.
• Fixed bug in request handling when incoming requests are attached to an existing response and the response is generated by directly accessing the res.servletResponse HttpServletResponse instance.
• Go back to Java 1.4 compatibility. The few generics uses aren't worth it to require Java 1.5.
• Made sub-properties updateable.
• Logging improvements, such as an additional log message when a request starts evaluating, making commit log messages look nicer and easier to parse, and improved thread naming including thread ids in helma log messages.
• Unified macro error handling, no longer dumping stack traces for macro errors.
• Ampersand is no longer encoded as entity when encountered in macro tags.
• Added support for secure and HttpOnly session cookies, with HttpOnly being enabled by default. The features are controlled through the httpOnlySessionCookie and secureSessionCookie app properties. We now compose and set the session cookie ourselves as this is the only reliable way to do it in a cross-servlet-container compatible way and without adding dependencies to the servlet container.
• Fixed a problem with the code evaluation order of repositories added via app.addRepository().
• Fixed app.xmlrpcCount to be increased for "new style" XML-RPC requests served by Jetty, fixing bug 629.
• Changed code to not track unset() on non-persitable properties, fixing bug 633.
• Fixed serialization for transient HopObjects.
• Synchronize more methods in TypeManager as well as app.addRepository() to avoid memory race conditions.
• Use LinkedHashMap for dirty node tracking to preserve insertion order.
• Made checkXmlRpc work with content-types containing a charset subheader, fixing bug 628.
• Continue parsing macro tags even if it is a comment. This is the only way we can correctly catch embedded macros. Fixes bug 588.
• Only resolve direct prototype matches in parent chain, fixing bug 617.

Now, please go download Helma 1.6.3rc1 and let us know in case something in these packages isn't ready for prime time!

Helma 1.6.3 Release Candidate 2

A second release candidate is ready to download . Please take a moment to check for any remaining problems with these packages.

See the Helma 1.6.3 Changelog for detailed information about the changes included in this new version.

Helma 1.6.3-rc3 ready for testing

The third release candidate can be taken for a spin . Again, see the Helma 1.6.3 Changelog for an updated list ofchanges included in the new version.

Release Candidate 3 contains some additional important changes, such as the totalUploadLimit value now being applied also to ordinary form post requests, as well as preventing a potential problem with the insertion order and making it easier to run Helma in other servlet containers.

>>> Helma turns 1.6.3