Release date: 30 31 August, 2016

We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 4.6.0.

Resources

• This release has been built against Java 8 and requires Java 8
• Downloads
• Javadocs

Team

Release Manager

• A. Soroka, the University of Virginia, with special guest starJared Whiklo, University of Manitoba

Developers

• A. Soroka, University of Virginia

• Aaron Birkland, Johns Hopkins University
  

• Unknown User (acoburn), Amherst College

• Aaron Elkiss, University of Michigan

• Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
• Benjamin Armintor, Columbia University
• Bethany Seeger, Amherst College
• Bill Branan, DuraSpace
• Esme Cowles, Princeton University
• Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
• Michael Durbin, University of Virginia
• Michael J. Giarlo, Stanford University
• Mirek Simek, University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague
• Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed, University of Maryland
• Nick Ruest, York University
• Peter Eichman, University of Maryland
• Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech

Issue Reporters

• Esmé Cowles

• Andrew Woods

• Unknown User (acoburn)

• Jim Coble

• Aaron Birkland

• Jared Whiklo

• Nick Ruest

• Mirek Simek

• Benjamin Armintor

• David Chandek-Stark

• Michael Durbin

• Bill Branan

• Perry Willett

• Michael J. Giarlo

• A. Soroka

• Scott Prater

• Doron Shalvi

• Trey Pendragon

• Rob Sanderson

• Yinlin Chen

Summary

The Fedora 4.6.0 release furthers several major objectives:

• Tighten the definition of the RESTful application programming interface (API)
• Improving Refining the Versioning capabilitymessaging service
• Use Re-establish performance test fixtures to examine the effects of different backends
• Improve durability with by encouraging the use of MySQL and PostgreSQL backends
• Deprecation of legacy Transform service
• Fix bugs

This release will be the last release built against a version of Modeshape that uses Infinispan for data storage.

Changes

Messaging Interface

As the draft Fedora Messaging (SPI) specification moves toward finalization, the message serialization format has been modified to track the recommendations outlined in this document. This will affect any existing message consumers. There are four significant changes that messaging applications should be aware of:

...

One of the technical priorities [3] of Fedora is to define a well-specified application programming interface (API) against which client applications can be written and future server-side implementations can be created. This Fedora API should be clear and detailed enough such that a corresponding technology compatibility kit [4] (TCK) would be able to indicate if any Fedora implementation fulfills or diverges from the specification. With this in mind, several issues were addressed in this release that clean up Fedora's RESTful interaction [5].  

An important particular change to note here is the move to use only weakly-validated ETags for RDF resources, in line with a correct interpretation of the HTTP specifications. This means that such ETags are no longer suitable for use with the If-Match request header. Additionally, the extensions fcr:transform has been marked as "deprecated" in favor of more robust tooling found in fcrepo-ldpath.

Versioning

Web Access Control

Documentation of Fedora's implementation of Web Access Controls is available on the wiki.This release includes several bug fixes related to versioning]:

Web Access Control

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Performance

The Performance and Scale group has been testing various versions of Fedora, including the 4.6.0 release candidates. Recent work has focused on running our JMeter test plans by multiple sites and testing the impact of using a relational database (MySQL or PostgreSQL) instead of LevelDB. The performance of the databases has been at least as good as LevelDB, and typically scales much better.  In addition, testing has identified scalability issues with containers that link to a large number of other containers, and is working to address that issue. The current status of testing is tracked in the wiki: Performance and Scalability Test Plans.

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Numerous refactorings, bugfixes, and clean-up tasks were addressed in this release [12]:

References

Complete Listing of Resolved Tickets