Retic EAI Server News

Though it's been a while since the last release, Jyretic is not dead. I just didn't have enough time and motivation to keep on sharing it with the community. But I've been working on it anyway mainly because I use it everyday at my office.

Inspired by what's going on for Jython (Sun's sponsorship and the upcoming 2.5 release, which is SO exciting!!!), I'm going back to work on Jyretic 3.0 and a brand new admin interface that should be a webapp (Django?) and or an Adobe Air App.... read more

I just posted a new Retic 1.32 windows package because the last one was missing some files that prevented it from launching at all...

Sorry for the inconvenience, everything should be ok now...

Since I've been on holidays during whole June, the next Retic release was postponed and should be available before July 15th.

Sorry about that.

Hi all,

For a while, I haven't been spending a lot of time working on Retic...
Well after a year of hard work, I needed to rest a bit.
This rest period is now getting to an end, and I'm ready to add valuable features to Retic (auto-restart on server crash, new components...), and to improve stability (many bugs are still to be corrected).

So keep an eye on it...

Bye,

Alexander

Retic Admin 1.3:

- New : popup menus have appeared to ease operations (try right-clicking on lists and trees), especially adaptor design.
- New : possibility to subscribe to get a notice on adaptor end, through a Jabber message (Email will come in future releases)
- Improvement : Refresh schedule is now threaded and non-blocking. You can then set auto-refresh on, while you'll be able to work on other tabs without being interrupted
- New : Images in Running/Terminated adaptors tracking let you know the execution status
- New : Terminated adaptors can be filtered according to end date/hour and/or status
- New : Partial internationalization support (french and english supported, through languages files) => All texts haven't been translated yet.... read more

Jabber communications with server don't work since 1.0RC3.
I'll ship a release on Thursday to correct several bugs including this one.

I found several bugs in the ToXML Pipe that prevent it from working.
Let me know if you want a corrected version of it before the next release of JyRetic (alexander.dejanovski@laposte.net).

Sorry about that.

JyRetic 1.0RC3 was just released.
(http://retic.sourceforge.net)

Changes are (I might have forgotten some bug fixes):

- Bug fix : Scheduled events didn't work if no parameter file was required
- Improvement : Speeded up SQL source when there were several records to extract (~x10)
- Improvement : since JDBC drivers return rowcount on query execution, there's no need (as there was in Python) to execute a count(*) for each query (which was automatically done). This gives drastical speed improvements (and works for all types of query)
- New : XindiceSource component. Perform XPath queries on Xindice Collections as data source.
- New : DateMetadata preprocessor.
- New : Jabber Postprocessor
- New : SMTP Postprocessor
- New : The adaptor class is now fully Java compatible and can thus be instantiated from a Java prog. (I'll bundle a Jar distribution to achieve this properly)
- New : Adaptors execution tracking is now stored into a HSQLDB embedded server => faster and more reliable communications with server
===== Note =========
- Improvement : SQLTree and SQLTreePlus sources have evolved in parent/child link strategy. Pre-existing adaptors won't work anymore. Please refer to the doc in order to know how to modify your adaptors.
====================... read more

I'm going to bundle JyRetic 1.0RC3 and Retic admin 1.2 real soon.

JyRetic 1.0RC3 :

- Bug fix : Scheduled events didn't work if no parameter file was required
- Improvement : Speeded up SQL source when there were several records to extract (~x10)
- Improvement : since JDBC drivers return rowcount on query execution, there's no need (as there was in Python) to execute a count(*) for each query (which was automatically done by the SQL components). This gives drastical speed improvements (and works for all types of query).
- New : XindiceSource component. Perform XPath queries on Xindice Collections as data source.
- New : DateMetadata preprocessor.
- New : Jabber Postprocessor
- New : SMTP Postprocessor
- New : The adaptor class is now fully Java compatible and can thus be instantiated from a Java prog. (I'll bundle a Jar distribution to achieve this properly)... read more

Retic goes Jython now, and is thus fully compatible with the Java platform. (I won't develop no more on the former Python version of Retic. )
This gives a better connectivity, essentially through JDBC and JMS.
Jython 2.1 is included in the release.

Available sources are : file, FTP, HTTP, JMS, SOAP, JDBC, XMLBlaster

Available pipes are : Zip, Unzip, Flat-to-XML, XML-to-Flat, XPath, XSLT, FOP (to produce PDF or PS from XSL-FO input), Excel (to produce MS Excel files from Gnumeric-XML input)... read more

Next release will come up with a jython version of Retic. Thus Retic (or JyRetic as it will be called) will have full JDBC and JMS support for better connectivity.
Retic Administrator has been reworked and gained in features and ease of use. It can be used with Retic as well as JyRetic.

Retic also gains limited (for the moment...) JMS support through the XMLRPC Bridge (developped in Jython...).... read more

Retic 0.6 comes with 3 new major features :

- Retic Administrator : a cross-platform (wxPython 2.4) GUI for creating/modifying adaptors and launching them. (replaces the buggy win32 Retic Designer)
- an XMLRPC server. Start it on a machine and after, launch adaptors on it remotely ( Retic Administrator uses it to launch adaptors on distant servers)
- Adaptors can be launched with parameter files, in order to execute one adaptor with distinct values
(ie : if you put %fileName% somewhere in the definition file of an adaptor, it will be replaced by the fileName value defined in the parameter file you pass as argument of your execution - see Retic's doc for more info).... read more

Well, it's been a while since the last release, but I've been working pretty hard on it since then.
First, I've rewritten the GUI in wxPython (with Boa constructor) to have it cross-platform (and much less buggy than the previous one...). Now it also permits to launch several adaptors and track execution and out trace.
Adaptors can also now be launched on remote servers with the XMLRPC/SOAP module. Start it on a machine and you can use XMLRPC or SOAP services to launch adaptors.
I've also added the possibility to use params files to use with adaptor config files. In config files, if you write something this way : %param1%, it will be replaced by the value of param1 in the param file passed as parameter to the adaptor. Launching adaptors becomes : ... read more

What's new/changed :

- Added SOAPSource component
- Added xmlBlasterSink component
- Added XindiceSink component (Apache foundation XML Database)
- Bug fixes in SQLTreeSource (Major one preventing from closing some tags correctly)
- Bug fix in SQLSource : fetchall() method was called without all the required arguments (used when msgSize = 0)
- Modified fileSink : Now choice is given between appending and overwriting output file
- Many improvements on exception handling (now written to loggers with ERROR level)
- Designer is not anymore shipped alone but bundled in the release (win32 only)... read more

I will ship the next release in 1 or 2 days.
It will have a beta of the SOAPSource component.
The exceptions will now be all handled properly, writing them with error level to the defined loggers.
I also found a big bug in the SQLTreeSource that prevented it from closing some tags properly (indent errors in the source code). It's ok now. I've tested it with really complex hierarchies and it works just fine.
Some feedback would be welcome from the people who downloaded Retic. Tell me what doesn't work in it so that I can fix it (I'll do it, I work hard on this soft).... read more

New components :

xmlBlasterSource
JabberSink
httpSink

New databases supported (I didn't say tested so bugs might appear) :

mxodbc
DCOracle2
Sybase
MySQL

I've annouced on python list that other databases modules than odbc were supported. It is actually untrue for 0.3.2 but will be for 0.3.3, which will be shipped tonight...

Sorry for that

0.3.2 was shipped and it should work a bit better
;o)

Last release of retic has a bug that prevents it from running with sources other than SQLTree. I'll upload a new debugged version tonight.

Sorry for that...

I've released a new version of Retic with new components :

- Pipes : XPathPipe and FlatToXMLPipe
- Source : SQLTreeSource (permits to build complex XML documents from several SQL requests).

The Designer is now fully working and supports all components of the current Retic release.

Have fun !!

Just released Retic 0.2.
What's new :
- Added designer, a Win32 GUI (Delphi6) to build adaptors (beta stage - doesn't properly support toXMLPipe and HTTPSource yet)
- SQLSource has now a commitSQL parameter, which should be built as the SQL statement of the SQLSink component (ie using $field_name to map to the SQL Statement extracted fields). The request is executed on commit phase of the source.... read more

Here's the first release of Retic. It is fully functional (yet in a really raw form - no GUI) and offers to build adaptors with the following components :

- Sources : File, FTP, HTTP and SQL
- Pipes : toXML, XSLT
- Sinks : File, FTP, SQL and SMTP

Python 2.3 is necessary as well as PyXML 0.8.3 and 4Suite 1.0a3 (bundled in the win32 release of Retic).

Enjoy !!

Here is a description of Retic :

It is an Open Adaptor-like program. The fact is that I needed a soft like
OpenAd but I'm pretty deceived by it (too complicated, never gives what I'm
waiting for on the other side of the adaptor).

Like Open Ad, Retic (that's the name of my project), provides components
(sources, pipes and sinks) that can be combined in many ways in order to
retrieve data (from a source) apply changes or transformations (with pipes)
and send it to several destinations (to sinks).
This is driven by config files in XML that contains all components and their
attributes.
All parent component sends its data (after processing it) to all of its child element.
So you can have trees that look like that :... read more