Kamaelia Release Notes

0.4.0

Summary

Kamaelia 0.4.0 is a consolidation, documentation and optimisation enhanced release.Whilst there are a wide variety of new components, existing functionality has been consolidated, and is now in use in a handful of (beta) production systems.

Kamaelia 0.4.0 requires the use of Axon 1.5 (released at the same time as this release).

Also, virtually all components now have highly detailed documentation inside their sourcefiles. A (large) subset of this is available here:

• http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Components.html

The examples have been duplicated onto the website, and are here:

• http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Cookbook.html

Our tutorial for helping getting started is here:

• http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/MiniAxon/

This has now been battle tested by a good few dozen people, and we feel is a good introduction to Kamaelia's approach, and others have also stated they find it a good way of understanding generators too. (even if they're not interested in Kamaelia)

Notable New Components

• Tools for Timeshifting Digital TV (DVB-T handling to be precise)
  These tools are only intended for use as legal under UK law, you need to check locally if you can use them.
• A software data backplane
• Tools for piping data easily/trivially through external processes
• Tools for taking advantage of system optimisations allowing quiescent behaviour. (both in terms of pygame & network based systems)
• Tools for using UDP

New Examples

• Tools for using UDP & SingleServer

A collaborative whiteboard "sketcher" which is both a server to other whiteboards and/or a client to other whiteboards. (Due to changes, when not in use CPU usage for these is as close to zero as it can be for any software) This is also a good example of usage of the backplane component.

This application is particularly nice to use in conjunction with a tablet PC!

An overview of the sketcher can be found on our systems page:

• http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Systems.html
  (see Collaborative Whiteboarding)

Examples for using the tools for timeshifting including:

Tuning into a TV channel on Freeview and recording it to disk

Dumping a DVB multiplex transport stream

Demultiplexing a prestored DVB multiplex

• http://bbc.kamaelia.org/cgi-bin/blog/blog.cgi

• http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/KamaeliaMacro.html

General overview of other large scale changes

Massively improved documentation across the board (no file left untouched). This is all largely in the form of pydoc based documentation, a fair chunk of it is available at

• http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Components.html

However the documentation in those files goes further than that, including many, many more examples than are even at:

• http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Cookbook.html

Large scale removal of cruft and change over to use pipelines and graphlines where suitable. This is most noticable inside the examples.

Code quality of a number of pieces of code has been improved:

• A small number of components have been rewritten from the 3 callback form into the generator form of component to simplify their implementation.

• Shutdown handling is now more consistent.

• Some core components have been rewritten, test first, now that their expected usage is clearer, making the system more dependable.

• Throughput handling has also generally been improved. Many locations where the following was written:
  

           if self.dataReady("inbox"):
              d = self.recv("inbox")
              e = SomeTransform(d)
              self.send(e, "outbox")

  
  We've discovered gain better throughput if you write:
  

           while self.dataReady("inbox"):
              d = self.recv("inbox")
              e = SomeTransform(d)
              self.send(e, "outbox")

• Improved handling of child components, specific examplars are pipeline & graphline components.

• Increased use of .activate() and .run() methods rather than manually using the Axon.Ipc.newComponent message of manually starting the scheduler.

• Peppered through the code is some hints to improve introspection and detection of components for both code generation and interactive graphical pipeline builder applications. Example lines added to files:
  

      __kamaelia_components__  = ( Annotator, RecoverOrder, )
      __kamaelia_prefab__ = ( SRM_Sender, SRM_Receiver)

  
  These can be extracted using Kamaelia.Data.Repository

Pygame related changes

• Major changes to do with how components update the display. Specifically they MUST send redraw requests through. This is akin to doing a flip for the surfaces.
• A private _PygameEventSource has also been created.

These two changes combined allow the system to become quiescent, where possible.

• A number of components now understand what to do if sent an alpha value on an alphacontrol inbox.

Detailed Overview of other changes

Initial release, largely rewritten or includes new components:

• Examples/example13/UDP_demo.py
• Examples/example15/Macro.py
• Examples/example15/SingleChannelTransportStreamCapture.py
• Examples/example15/TransportStreamCapture.py
• Examples/example15/TransportStreamDemuxer.py
• Kamaelia/Codec/__init__.py
• Kamaelia/Community/__init__.py
• Kamaelia/Data/Repository.py
• Kamaelia/Data/tests/test_MimeDict.py
• Kamaelia/Device/__init__.py
• Kamaelia/Device/DVB/Core.py
• Kamaelia/Device/DVB/EIT.py
• Kamaelia/Device/DVB/__init__.py
• Kamaelia/File/UnixPipe.py
• Kamaelia/Internet/UDP.py
• Kamaelia/Util/Backplane.py
• Kamaelia/Util/Console.py
• Kamaelia/Support/Tk/Scrolling.py
• Kamaelia/Internet/ConnectedSocketAdapter.py
• Kamaelia/Internet/Selector.py
• Kamaelia/KamaeliaIPC.py
• Kamaelia/Util/RateFilter.py

Changed to take advantage of Axon changes allowing quiescent behaviour:

Kamaelia/Internet/ConnectedSocketAdapter.py

Kamaelia/Internet/Selector.py

Kamaelia/Chassis/ConnectedServer.py

Kamaelia/Internet/TCPClient.py

Kamaelia/Internet/TCPServer.py

Kamaelia/UI/PygameDisplay.py

Kamaelia/UI/Pygame/Button.py

Kamaelia/Util/Introspector.py

New/Changed functionality to existing components:

• Kamaelia/Visualisation/PhysicsGraph/TopologyViewerComponent.py
• Kamaelia/Visualisation/PhysicsGraph/chunks_to_lines.py
• Kamaelia/UI/Pygame/Ticker.py
• Kamaelia/UI/Pygame/KeyEvent.py
• Tools/PipeBuilder/GUI.py
• Tools/VisualPipeBuilder.py (no longer uses a hardcoded list of components)
• Examples/example10/SimpleDiracPlayer.py

Namespace cleanup:

• Kamaelia/Util/ConsoleEcho.py --> Kamaelia/Util/Console.py
• Kamaelia/SimpleServer.py --> Kamaelia/Chassis/ConnectedServer.py
• The marshalling code in util has had a similar change.

Michael, June 2006