FluidDB: New Features

[Nicholas Tollervey]

Dear All,

We're pleased to announce that the update due on November 15th will contain the following new features and changes:

• /about added to HTTP API - It will be possible to access FluidDB objects that have a fluiddb/about tag value with requests whose path starts with /about. For example, the object about "Barcelona" can be reached directly via /about/Barcelona. The behaviour of /about, when given an about value, is exactly like that of /objects when given an object id. More information will be available in the API docs at http://api.fluidinfo.com/. Many thanks to Holger Dürer (http://twitter.com/hd42) for suggesting this improvement.
• /values added to HTTP API - It is now possible to manipulate multiple tag values in a single API request to /values via the PUT, GET and DELETE HTTP methods. From the user's perspective, this will result in a significant improvement in performance. More information can be found in the API docs at http://api.fluidinfo.com/.
• "SEE" permission replaced with "READ" - the permissions system has been simplified. FluidDB now uses only the READ permission on tags to decide whether API calls accessing the tag values should be allowed to proceed. Anything that used the SEE permission now uses READ. For example, when you do a GET on an object to retrieve the names of its tags, you will only receive those for which you have READ permission. Many thanks to Jamu Kakar (http://twitter.com/jkakar) for suggesting this simplification.
• Deleting a tag instance now always returns an HTTP 204 (No content) code - DELETEing a tag value from an object that did not have that tag used to result in a "404 (Not found)" status. This will be changed to simply return the non-error "204 (No Content)".
• "Content-MD5" header for checking payload content - It will be possible to send a checksum of a payload to FluidDB via the "Content-MD5" header. FluidDB will attempt to validate the checksum with the payload and return a "412 (Precondition failed)" status in the case of a mismatch.
• Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) added to HTTP API - it will be possible to make cross origin requests as specified by http://www.w3.org/TR/cors/ rather than rely on JSONP. FluidDB will have an almost complete implementation of this emerging standard although we expect to make changes and improvements as the specification matures.
• Text indexing of fluiddb/about tag values - text indexing is coming to FluidDB but is definitely a work in progress. This release is just the very first step: the fluiddb/about tag will be indexed from the update onwards (existing fluiddb/about tag values will be indexed over the coming days/weeks). 

Of course, the website and API documentation will be updated too and we're more than happy to answer your questions in this news group or on the #fluiddb IRC channel on Freenode (irc.freenode.net).

For those of you who have written or maintain a client library for FluidDB we'd like to refer you to the changes we've made to the Fluid Object Mapper (FOM) library as a reference for what you might want to do with your own library. Please visit http://launchpad.net/fom for more information. 

To encourage people to add the new FluidDB capabilities to libraries, we're going to extend the FluidDB "Weekend of Code" offer to library authors. Let us know when you're working on your library and where we can find it (Github, Bitbucket, Sourceforge etc) and we'll order you a pizza and send you a book of your choice from Amazon. (The original offer can be found here: http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/2009/09/17/fluiddb-weekend-of-code/)

Finally, we're moving to a four-week development cycle so expect regular updates, pro-active bug squashing and lots of progress in the coming months. We've got lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline and we can't wait to see how the FluidDB community reacts.

Thank you for your continued support,

The Fluidinfo team.

[Jeremy Dunck]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 3:11 AM, Nicholas Tollervey <nt...@fluidinfo.com> wrote:
> Finally, we're moving to a four-week development cycle so expect regular
> updates, pro-active bug squashing and lots of progress in the coming months.
> We've got lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline and we can't wait to see
> how the FluidDB community reacts.

Good stuff, Nic.

While poking around on the fluidinfo site just now, I realized it
would be useful to cross-link these pages:
http://doc.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/api/interface.html
http://fluidinfo.com/developers/opensource/

Along those lines, I think it would be kind of cool to show a
leaderboard - basically a list of the most active FDB users for some
time period. It could be a nice way to discover interesting uses of
FDB.

[H Durer]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 09:11, Nicholas Tollervey <nt...@fluidinfo.com> wrote:

Dear All,

We're pleased to announce that the update due on November 15th will contain the following new features and changes:

  [...]

One word: "woot!"  I'll try to get those changes into my libs soonish.

   Holger

[Nicholas Tollervey]

Hi Folks,

Just a quick note to say that the update was completed on Monday according to schedule.

The reason we've only just emailed is that we encountered a gremlin in the retrieval of 

opaque (binary) values. No data was lost and everything is now running as normal. We just

wanted to run tests and make sure everything was working properly before confirming the

update was complete.

We'd also like to remind you that we've adopted a four-week development cycle so the 

next new release will arrive at the start of December. We'll be updating the Sandbox

instance a week before the main release so everyone has an opportunity to play with new

features and help us spot bugs. I'll also email the list very soon with details of what our 

development focus for this cycle will be. Please don't hesitate to give suggestions and

feedback or tell us where we could improve. We'd love to hear what you think.

Finally, please remember to take us up on our pizza/book "Weekend of Code" offer. We're 

not joking! We're not delivering from Barcelona or New York so the pizza *will* be warm.

All the best,

Nicholas.