Thursday, March 27, 2008

Gnizr 2.3.0 Final Release

Gnizr 2.3.0 Final Release is now available for download.

We're happy to announce the final release of gnizr 2.3.0. This marks a major advancement in the design and implementation of an open source social bookmarking and Web 2.0 mashup application. Several new features are introduced in 2.3.0 and many bugs have been fixed since the release of 2.2.0.

We thank those users who have reported issues and given us feedbacks. Without them, the open source gnizr project would not be possible.

Feature Highlights

Using SKOS for Search Term Suggestion

Administrator can define a set of tag relationships to assist the search of bookmarks. Tag relationships are defined using SKOS vocabulary -- narrower, broader and related-to. Read more.

OpenSearch Support

Gnizr users can search bookmarks and other resources on the Web under a unified search interface, which is similar to that of the A9 search engine. Administrator can customize the set of OpenSearch services that are available to gnizr users. Read more.

Improved User Interface

We try hard to improve gnizr user experience. In this release, we made an effort to improve tag relationship management, tag suggestion and auto-complete, machine tag helper, and gnizr bookmarklet.

What's Next (gnizr 2.4.0)

We've started the development of the next generation of gnizr. Couple major features are under development:
  • Integrate Apache Lucene search
  • Search gnizr via Firefox search plugin
  • New machine tags for describing bookmark content (video, photo, audio etc.)

We expect to release gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1 in the next couple weeks.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Gnizr 2.3.0 Release Candidate 2

Gnizr 2.3.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download.

This should be the last candidate release of 2.3.0. Unless there are reports of major code bugs, we will finalize the release of 2.3.0 in couple weeks.

In this RC release, we fixed couple bugs. One of which is related to running RSS robot. We discovered that the Java thread that runs the robot is not properly terminated when the hosting Servelet Container is shutdown. Fixes have been added to the code. If you use 2.3.0 RC2 and still experience "dangling" threads when your Servlet Container is shutdown., please let us know.

We also updated Java API documentation and a Wiki page that describes the implementation of gnizr User Authentication. We will continue to improve our developer documentations.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Gnizr 2.3.0 RC 1 Build Failure

A developer reported to us that he is unable to build gnizr 2.3.0 RC1 after checking out the source from the SVN. We looked into the problem and discovered that the problem is caused by JUnit test failures in building the gnizr-robot package.

This problem has been reported to the bug tracking system: issue 46.

We will fix this problem in the upcoming gnizr 2.3.0 RC2 release. For now, if you are building RC1 from the source, use 'mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true install' to skip all JUnit tests.