Comet releases 1.1.2 and 1.2.0

[John Swinbank]

I’m pleased to announce the releases of versions 1.1.2 and 1.2.0 of Comet, my implementation of the VOEvent transport protocol.

Version 1.1.2 fixes a bug which could result in malformed event IVORNs exhausting the available resources and ultimately rendering Comet unable to process more events. Users of the 1.1.x series are encouraged to upgrade (GitHub #34).

Version 1.2.0 introduces a range of new features and fixes:

* When subscribing to a remote broker, we wait for a short period after the initial connection is made before marking it as successful. This means that if the broker rapidly drops the connection (e.g. due to an authentication failure), we retry the connection with an exponential back-off rather than an immediate reconnection (GitHub #29).

* Timestamps in iamalive messages are marked as being in UTC.

* authenticate messages which specify XPath filters are schema compliant (GitHub #31).

* Subscriber refuses to start if an XPath --filter is specified with invalid syntax (GitHub #33).

* Require that a valid IVOA identifier (IVORN) be supplied by the end user when starting Comet rather than relying on a default.

* Require that events submitted to the broker by authors have valid IVORNs

Comet is available for download from <http://comet.transientskp.org/>. It is released under an open source (2 clause BSD) license, and development takes place at <https://github.com/jdswinbank/Comet/>. Your questions, comments, feedback and pull requests are welcome.

Cheers,

John