I’ve had two successive Marionette Collective releases recently, I was hoping to have one big one but I was waiting for the Stomp maintainers to do a release and it was taking a while.
These two releases are both major feature releases covering major feature sets. See lower down for a breakdown of it all.
We’re nearing feature completeness for the SimpleRPC layer as I am adding a number of features of interest to Enterprise and Large users especially around security and web UIs.
Once we’re at the end of this cycle I’ll do a 1.0.0 release and then from there move onto the next major feature cycle. The next cycle will focus on queuing long running tasks, background scheduling, future scheduling of tasks and a lot of related work. I posted some detail about these plans to the list recently.
Over the new few days or weeks I’ll do a number of Screencasts exploring some of these new features in depth, for now the list of what’s new:
Security
- New SSL based security system
- New Authorization system [blog post] and sample plugins, allowing for fine grained control over every request
Connectivity
We can use Ruby Gem Stomp 1.1.6 which brings a lot of enhancements:
- Connection pools for failover between multiple ActiveMQs
- Lots of tunables about the connection pools such as retry frequencies etc
- SSL TLS between node and ActiveMQ
Writing Web and Dynamic UIs
- A DDL that describes agents, inputs and outputs:
- Creates auto generated documentation
- Can be used to auto generate user interfaces
- The client library will only make requests that validate against the DDL
- In future input validations will move into the DDL and will be done automatically for you
- Web UI’s can bypass or do their own discovery and use the DDL to auto generate user interfaces
Usability
- Fire-and-Forget style requests, for when you just want something done but do not care about results, these requests are very quick as they do not do any discovery.
- Agents can now be reloaded without restarting the daemon
- A new mc-inventory tool that can be used to view facts, agents and classes for a node
- Many UI enhancements to the CLI tools
