iPAM Revision History
Release	Notes
2.5.107	3/16/2000 Significant Changes New input and output agent pair- acceptSerializedProduct and putSerializedProduct. Togehter they allow you to connect an instance of iPAM on one host to another instance of iPAM across a local area network (without intervening firewalls) Developer's notes Minor changes to resource control functions to recognize bandwidth consumers such as video streams in addition to "chunky" consumers such as file streams. Known bugs [1] Sometimes Bert will not refresh portions of the screen during a scroll of the BERT display area. Problem seen on Windows NT and is believed to be unique to that platform. If this happens resizing the window by even one pixel seems to cause a proper refresh.
2.4.91	11/15/1999 Significant Changes New output agent - putOnLocalMap - An example interface to the Object/FX SpatialX product New output agent - processViaECMAScript, allows you to "build" products using a custom ECMA script Interface to America Online's Instant Messenger service via acceptAIM and putAIM agents New input - getJDBC - gets data from JDBC databases New handler - forwardAsXMLFile - Convert products into XML format New handler - processViaXSL - create custom .html pages using XSL New monitoring tool - watcher - Visual tool to continuously monitor your configuration New handler - generateTrigger - Activates, enables, or disables other handlers New handler - extractProperties - Extracts name-value pairs (as metadata) from the content of a semistructured composite string product. New handler - replaceWords - Replaces words and phrases in input strings based on a "table" of substitute words/phrases. Supporting files are now part of the PAMCore.zip file. The first time iPAM is run the support files will be created. If support files already exist on older installations then they will be updated automatically. Minor changes iPAM now starts much more quickly than it used to. Bert also reads configurations more quickly. Mods to smtp interaction and additional mime types updates to run on Linux x86 using rt_1.1.7-v3-glibc-x86 - some minor Linux issues remain, interested users should contact cda@mitre.org Developer's notes Product can now be created a bit more "cleanly" via a product factory. A reference to the product factory can be obtained from the exec. The product factory also manufactures product pools. Product pools can be used to help reduce "out of memory" problems for high throughput information channels
2.3.73	7/29/1999 Significant changes Bert handles enumerated agent attributes by displaying a popup list of choices. Helps avoid having to have the documentation open while you build your channels. Fixed a bug that crept in the last release when the startup wizard was activated the first time that iPAM was run Can now edit agent attributes from the Administration GUI in addition to from the BERT gui BERT can now display and configure iPAM Daemons, however, it does not let you create them. To get this release out the door it lists them under the Juggler list. You still need to edit the startup file to create them Initial release of the "infer" agent with which you can build a production rule expert system to build channels in response to events. Documentation is still cursory, though. Minor changes Worked around an annoying screen drawing bug in Java 1.1.7 and 1.1.8 under WindowsNT that affected Bert Minor rework in asynchronous output queues. putMail origination date fix acceptSMTPMail agent has additional attributes to support "push" mail Files marked as non-keepers in the getDirectory agent now get properly deleted Tweaks to the AltaVista and the getSmarTraveler input agents Developer's notes Revamped the implementation of DictionaryProduct. Now makes use of AttributeKeys to access attributes more efficiently. Minor rework on QueuedDIM1 base class
2.2.63	5/5/1999 Significant changes Name change to iPAM - Information Personalization Agent Manager Better integration and coordination between synchronous and asyncrhronous data flows, Version 2.2 is a recommended update for anyone using Version 2.1 New juggler, countProducts, keeps track of number bytes moved and the number of products moved New juggler generateTrigger New juggler queue New juggler passIfPointInsidePolygon Enhancement to bytesPerMinuteResourcePool  Can be used for infrequent, file based as well as frequent, message based product flows Budget changes will cause throttleBytesPerMinute juggler to recompute their delays Minor changes The executive invokes java garbage collection every few minutes to minimize delays that might otherwise be encountered when the system runs out of memory and garbage collection happens "en mass." This behavior was encountered on some Java implementations. Developer's notes There is a new sublcass of BasicProduct called a DictionaryProduct. This is an experimental structure designed for use with semistructured data types, including database query results. The QueuedDIMShell base class has a new option so that if the queue is full the decision to discard products can be made based on product salience. Products with the lowest salience are discarded to make room in the queue for higher salience products. Numerous try/catch blocks added to ftp transfer agents to ensure that all sockets are closed under all conditions.
2.1.43	2/8/1999 Significant changes getAltaVista now properly parses the current www.altavista.com format New handler (juggler) streamThru designed for efficient handling of near-real-time "streams" New test PIM/input agent - getPIMByteArray designed to generate byte array products for testing Bert bug with renaming agents fixed Minor changes A new attribute on all agents, logActivity, allows you to turn off logging for agents that are very active. The table of contents pim/input agent was renamed to acceptTableOfContents The remote connector PIM/input agent was renamed to acceptRemoteConnector Minor change to throttling algorithm for the byte-per-minute related handler and daemon Developer's notes There is a new BasicProduct content type of byte[] that can be used for "opaque" products There is a new base class, QueuedDIMShell that is designed for near-real-time output agents that implement their own output stream. The base class has built in queueing so that data to be output can be buffered without holding up the inputs
2.0.41	1/12/1999 Significant changes Under the hood an new messaging model has been set up to facilitate future development of near-real-time product flows, see the event flow architecture documentation page Any PIM/input agent that had an attribute of "sourceSpec" has had that attribute renamed to something more descriptive Any DIM/output agent that had an attribute of "targetSpec" has had that attribute renamed to something more descriptive A new scheduling attribute, "once" allows you to create a juggler that only runs once. This can be used in conjunction with a new Daemon, deleteExpiredAgents, that can delete associated inputs/output after any agent runs once. New handler (Juggler) throttleBytesPerMinute New daemon bytesPerMinuteResourcePool Many Juggler/Handlers that used to perform filtering or other "simple" data transformation functions have lost their scheduling capability. To use these just connect them before or after a passthru agent. Passthru is one of the agents that can still be scheduled. BERT Bug When you create a new instance of an agent ,then rename the instance, then connect it to another agent, then post the changes to PAM, the configuration that actually gets written to PAM can have missing connections or missing agents. The workaround is to create the new agent, rename it, then post to PAM. After that post you make necessary connections and post them as a second post.   Minor changes Agent attributes now appear in alphabetic order on the main PAM gui's acceptSMTPMail is now properly a PIM type (used to be juggler) Developer's notes Existing product attributes are now documented. They are id, description, lifeTimeLong A new BasicProduct content type of byte[] is now available. Has not been extensively tested.
040	12/3/1998 Significant changes New handler (Juggler) passAsHTMLIndex New handler (Juggler) notifyOfProduct New output agent (DIM) putCDF (early release, subject to change) 2 new support directories to support the CDF output agent and generalized MIME typing. Be sure to update your 0supportDir Minor changes Fix to getURL where it dropped file extensions Bert bug when canceling during creation of a new agent attribute Minor output format change for summaries produced by the plain text renderer (used by putMail and other output agents) Developer's notes The LARK XML non-validating parser code has been included as part of core.
031 - 039	See older version description page
< 30	See still older version description page