NOV JAN Feb 13 2008 2010 2011 8 captures 8 Apr 08 - 13 Jan 10

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Borland VisiBroker 8.0 Release Notes

1. Solaris 64-bit on SPARC

2. Windows on x86 and x64 (64-bit Xeon and Opteron)

3. RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.0 on x86, x64 (64-bit Xeon and Opteron)

4. SuSE Enterprise Linux 10.0 on x86, x64 (64-bit Xeon and Opteron)

5. HP-UX 64-bit on PA-RISC (classical and standard C++)

6. HP-UX 64-bit on Itanium (classical and standard C++)

7. AIX 64-bit on PPC (classical and standard C++)

This release note contains information specific to the Borland VisiBroker 8.0 release. This is a major release of the VisiBroker product suite that includes a value-added feature set and also addresses most of the customer-reported problems.

This release note contains the following sections:

• New Features in VisiBroker

• Licensing

• Platform and code set information

• Installation changes (For upgrading from previous versions)

• Compatibility notes

• Tools update

• Properties update

• Late Breaking and Known Issues in this release

• Bugs fixed in this release (including Service Pack information)

New Features in VisiBroker

VisiBroker for C++

ORB componentization

• Instead of having a single, monolithic ORB library as in previous versions, VisiBroker for C++ 8.0 has a kernel library, the ORB Core, and six component libraries. The ORB Core needs to be linked to any VBC application, while the component libraries can be selected on demand by linking or using property.
  
  In addition, to reduce the migration effort, VisiBroker for C++ 8.0 also provide a library having the same name (The library suffix may be different on some platforms) as previous single ORB library. Please see Installation changes for more information on the library names.

CORBA 3.0 compliance

• VisiBroker for C++ now conforms to CORBA 3.0 specification. All changes between the earlier 2.6 and 3.0 are implemented. However, please note that CORBA Component Model (CCM) and GIOP 1.3 related features are NOT implemented.

IP v6 support on windows

• VisiBroker is now supported on IP v6 infrastructure on Windows. On other platforms, the support already exists. A new property, vbroker.se.xxx.scm.yyy.listener.preferIPv4Stack is introduced. This is a C++ only property. The default value is true. The property will be suppressed if vbroker.se.xxx.host is set to be IP address.

VisiBroker for Java

CORBA 3.0 compliance

• VisiBroker for Java now conforms to CORBA 3.0 specification. All changes between the earlier 2.6 and 3.0 are implemented. However, please note that CORBA Component Model (CCM) and GIOP 1.3 related features are NOT implemented.

JDK 1.5 language support

• Compilers java2idl and java2iiop in VisiBroker 8.0 can now parse Java 1.5 language features. This also includes support for marshalling Java Typesafe Enum in the ORB.

Message Fragmentation and Requests Interleaving

• VisiBroker for Java now supports true message fragmentation to improve performance and memory utilization in the marshalling engine when request/reply payload is high. In addition to that, if message fragmentation is being used and multiple client threads are writing on the same connection then requests are no longer serialized. Message fragmentation is off by default; it can be turned on using the property vbroker.orb.fragmentSize

IPv6 support on windows

• VisiBroker is now supported on IP v6 infrastructure on Windows. On other platforms, the support already exists.

VisiBroker Transaction service (VisiTransact)

Retry queue configuration

• VisiTransact completes the transaction successfully if no errors are found during the two-phase commit protocol. If any errors are encountered, however, it puts the transaction in the retry pool so that the Transaction Service can later attempt to run the two-phase commit protocol to complete the transaction. The transaction is retried based on the retry time. By default, on failure, transaction is retried for ever unless a stop completion command is issued from VB Console to stop the retry attempts.
  
  In VB 8.0 a property vbroker.ots.completionRetryAttempts is defined to configure the retry attempts. This poperty takes an integer value "n" and behaves the following way:
  n <= 0 : Default behaviour where the txn is forever put in RetryQ computing the retrytime.
  n > 0 : Transaction is put in retryQ and during nth attempt txn is run to completion and no retry attempts would be made on it again.

Support for Java clients

• VisiBroker for Java now supports its clients to become OTS clients to become transaction originators and servers to become transactional servers. In earlier versions, for Java clients to interact with OTS, Borland AppServer components were required. This dependency has now been removed. Please note that session management functionality needed for recoverable servers talking to backend resources is not provided as this feature is almost infringing on J2EE realm.

• OTS specification compliance is 1.4

• To enable this feature set vbroker.orb.enableTransactions=true.

VisiBroker Security service (VisiSecure)

GUI based login in VisiSecure for Java

• VisiSecure 8.0 for Java, now, ships a GUI based JAAS callback handler, which works with all shipped login modules and Certificate based credential acquisition. The callback handler is based on Swing and works on all supported JDK and platforms uniformly. In order to use the callback handler, please set callback handler property to the fully qualified class name of the handler, as follows.
  vbroker.security.authentication.callbackHandler=com.borland.security.provider.authn.DialogCallbackHandler

Certificate revocation list in VisiSecure for C++

• VisiSecure 8.0 for C++ , now, enables applications to specify the CRL of the trusted certificate that is being added through VBSSLContext::addTrustedCertificate API call (see header file vbssp.h)
  class _VBSECEXPORT VBSSLContext {
  …
  virtual void
  addTrustedCertificate ( const CORBAsec::X509Cert& trusted, 
  const CORBAsec::ASN1Object* crl = NULL) = 0;
  …
  };
  
  The new parameter in VisiSecure 8.0 for C++ is printed is shown above. It is defaulted to NULL, in which case it assumes that there is no CRL associated with the passed trusted certificate, which is exactly what happens in the former release, in which only the first parameter exists.
  
  The call accepts CRL binary DER data that is wrapped in a CORBA octet sequence object (CORBAsec::ASN1Object is just a typedef to CORBA::OctetSequence).
  
  For converting a CRL form B64 text to binary DER format, a method is added into the CertificateFactory.
  
  class _VBSECEXPORT CertificateFactory {
  …
  virtual CORBAsec::ASN1Object*
  importCRL( const CORBAsec::ASN1Object& b64crl ) const = 0;
  …
  };
  
  The property vbroker.security.CRLRepository in former release is deprecated in 8.0, for CRLs, applications are expected to use the new API that provides explicit association between the trusted certificate and its CRL.

Licensing

• Borland VisiBroker must be licensed and registered before it will run; there is no grace period. However, you may start the LM Administrator tool and then license the application remotely. For instructions on how to register your license, go to http://support.borland.com/kbshow.php?q=30254

Platform and code set information

For VisiBroker platform information, go to: http://support.borland.com/kbshow.php?q=29385

VisiBroker for C++

Code set support for VisiBroker for C++

• Native code set for char (tcsc) = ISO-LATIN-1 (ISO-8859-1)

• Conversion code sets for char = -Nil-

• Native code set for wide char (tcsw) = UTF-16

• Conversion code sets for wide char = -Nil-

• As the charset of UCS-2 Level 1 is compatible with UTF-16, UCS-2 Level 1 is also supported for VisiBroker for C++.

VisiBroker for Java

Code set support for VisiBroker for Java

• Please see the Client Basics chapter of the VisiBroker for Java Developer's Guide.

Installation Changes

VisiBroker for C++

ORB componentization

• Instead of having a single ORB library in previous versions, VisiBroker for C++ 8.0 has a kernel library, the ORB Core, and six component libraries. The ORB Core needs to be linked to any VBC application, while the component libraries can be selected on demand by linking or using property. 
  
  In addition, to reduce the migration effort, VisiBroker for C++ 8.0 also provide a library having the same name (The library suffix may be different on some platforms) as previous single ORB library.

  Component  name	Library base name	How to enable	Exported header file	Name of property	Default value	Comments
  Interface repository	ir	Linking	ir_c.hh *
  DSUser	dsuser	Property		vbroker.agent.enableLocator	True
  Server manager	srvrmgr	Property **	servermgr_c.hh, servermgr_s.hh	vbroker.orb.enableServerManager	False
  Dynamic any	dynany	Linking	dynany.h
  Firewall	fw	Property	firewall_c.hh	vbroker.orb.enableFirewall	False	New property in 8.0
  Location service	locsvc	Linking
  Core ORB	orbcore
  Complete ORB wrapper	orb					Static library wrapping all the components. Provided for backwards compatibility.***

  * An application needs to include “ir_c.hh” explicitly, or define _VIS_INCLUDE_IR before including “corba.h”.
  ** Linking if application explicitly uses definitions in Server Manager Header files.
  *** For HP-UX PA-RISC platform, the library is dynamic link library with .sl extension, while for HP-UX Itanium platform, the library is dynamic link library with .so extension.

Compatibility notes

VisiBroker for C++

Binary compatibility

• VisiBroker for C++ is not binary compatible with previous releases including VisiBroker 7.0. In this release, the monolithic ORB has been componentized as explained in Installation changes section. Because of this feature, it was difficult to maintain binary compatibility.

Library naming convention

• The libraries' naming convention in VisiBroker for C++ of HP-UX Itanium platform has been changed from VisiBroker 7.0. They are now following the VisiBroker 8.0 standardization, which is: standard libraries will be having _p infix, while classical libraries do not have. E.g. liborb64_pr.so.8.0 is the standard library, while liborb64_r.so.8.0 is the classical one.

VisiBroker for Java

Idl2java source generation

• idl2java compiler has introduced a fix related to the section 4.18.2 in IDL2Java specification 1.3. As shown below, if you have an IDL using typedefs on the typedef of a sequence or an array and they are later used as a parameter to an operation: 
  
  typedef XXX A; // XXX is a sequence or array
  typedef A B;
  
  interface I {
  void op(inout B param);
  };
  
  then the method parameters in interface I's stub and skeleton are different from those generated in VisiBroker 7.0. The difference is shown below: 
  
  void op(BHolder param) { ... } // in VisiBroker 7.0
  void op(AHoler param) { ... } // in VisiBroker 8.0
  
  As per IDL2Java specification, idl2java compiler in VisiBroker 8.0 will NOT generate holder class for B; it is required that you update the client and server code and make use of A's holder class

Tools update

VisiBroker for Java

Java 2 IDL and Java 2 IIOP compilers

1. Compilers java2idl and java2iiop in VisiBroker 8.0 can now parse Java 1.5 language features. This also includes support for marshalling Java Typesafe Enum in the ORB.

Properties update

VisiBroker for C++

VisiBroker for Java

VisiBroker Transaction service (VisiTransact)

Late Breaking and Known issues in this release

The readme.html bundled with the product has invalid links, the following links need to be accessed instead:

• Release Notes - http://techpubs.borland.com/am/visibroker/v80/en/VBroker_80_ReleaseNotes.html

• VisiBroker documentation on the web - http://techpubs.borland.com/am/v80/

• Newsgroups - http://support.borland.com/community/index.php?t=index&cat=35&

VisiBroker for C++

• Request is not serviced when using Main Thread Model with LIOP in Windows(CR9186). To work around the problem, please specify the property vbroker.se.liop_tm.scm.liop_tm.manager.enabled=false. This issue will be resolved in a future release.

• For IOR that is registered with OAD using oadutil, we will need to omit the "-e -vbroker.oad.locateAlways=true" property to allow spawned Server to locate OAD. Hence, Server will be slow in starting up.(CR9449)

VisiBroker for Java

• (On Win and Solaris)Applets with callback objects will fail to load because of API changes in org.omg.PortableServer.POAManager interface. These changes were done as part of CORBA 3.0 specification. To work around the problem use the vbjendorse.jar. This issue will be resolved in a future release.

• For VBJ Server that is registerd with OAD using oadutil will now need to have "-e -vbroker.oad.locateAlways=true" added, else client will not be able to locate the VBJ Server that is started by OAD and returned with CORBA::NO_RESPONSE. (CR9443)

VisiBroker Transaction service (VisiTransact)

• When a multi threaded java OTS client interacts with a PMT enabled VBC server, the results are not consistent (CR8989). This issue will be resolved in a future release. This will be resolved in future release.

VisiBroker Notification service (VisiNotify)

• When Notification Service is used with Priority and OrderPolicy equal to PriorityOrder, in some scenarios, CORBA::MARSHAL exception is thrown (CR9284). This issue will be resolved in a future release.

Bugs fixed in this release

Service Pack Information

The last merged VBE Service Pack was VBE 7.0 SP 1

Issues fixed (all components)