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Allegro Common Lisp 8.0 Beta

An emphasis for ACL 8.0 development has been on stability in multiprocessing environments. Testing is showing the stability of Allegro CL 8.0 equals or surpasses that of a fully updated Allegro CL 7.0. For more information, contact info@franz.com.

New Products:

AllegroCache -- AllegroCache is a high-performance, dynamic object caching database system. It allows programmers to work directly with objects as if they were in memory while in fact the object data is always stored persistently. It supports a full transaction model with long and short transactions, and meets the classic ACID requirements for a reliable and robust database. It automatically maintains referential integrity of complex data objects. AllegroCache provides 64-bit real-time data caching on the application memory to achieve very high data access throughput by applications over as large a data set as necessary. Some features include:

Persistent CLOS Objects in all Allegro Common Lisp Enterprise Edition platforms -- Class definitions are stored as first class objects in the database.
Dynamic Schema Evolution -- Redefine classes on the fly, persistent objects are lazily updated when accessed.
Standalone & Client Server -- Single user on local disk or multiple clients talking to single server over sockets.
Native lisp btrees -- Comparable in speed with BerkeleyDB, with more control.
Transactional model -- All ACID features, commit/rollback, and optimistic concurrency.
Supports databases with billions of objects (and Terabytes of Data)
Convenient macros to loop over classes, maps and sets
Indexed slots -- A mapping from slot-values to objects, retrieve objects and object ids (oid).
Maps -- Transactionally safe persistent hashtables.
Sets -- Persistent large collections of objects.
Supports most common datatypes -- Including unsigned-byte 8 arrays, maps and sets.
Object ID's unique for the lifetime of the database -- User accessible.
Restore databases after power failure or disk crash -- Lose only minimal amount of information after last commit.
Dump the database into XML files
Restore database from the XML dump
User controlled caching -- For the size of the btrees and the total number of objects stored in the cache.

64-bit ACL on Mac OS X and Solaris Opteron/AMD64 -- Allegro Common Lisp now runs natively on the 64-bit Mac OS X and 64-bit Solaris AMD platforms. The compiler is highly optimized to exploit the AMD64 instruction set, and as with our other 64-bit ports the full 64-bit address space is available for your application. This platform is ideal for your server applications.
IDE on Linux (Preview) -- The IDE is the Allegro CL Integrated Development Environment. It works in concert with a windowing system called Common Graphics. It has been available for Allegro CL's MicroSoft Windows product for many years. It is now available on x86 Linux platforms running Allegro CL 8.0.

New Features:

IPv6 -- Internet Protocol version 6 socket support.
Pcache -- An update to Allegro Prolog, an implementation of Prolog within Allegro CL. It allows Allegro Prolog to be used as a query language for AllegroCache.
Major jLinker update -- Jlinker now uses JNI if on the same platform.
Major COM/OLE update -- A high-level OLE/OCX interface has been added to complement the low-level interface available some time. The core of the new high-level interface is automatically reading typelibs and automatically creating the interface on the Lisp side.
SWIG interface to C++ -- (see www.swig.org for more information).
HTML Widget in Common Graphics -- Used by the IDE help facility for better integration.
OpenGL on Windows/Linux -- OpenGL is a collection of 2D and 3D graphics routines providing an environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications (see www.opengl.org). Allegro CL contains an interface to OpenGL 1.1 on Windows and 1.2 and 1.3 on Linux platforms.
Large file support -- On 32-bit platforms this greatly increases the size of files that can be reliably handled. (Functions which may not have worked before but now do include file-position and file-length, and the OS Interface functions stat, os-truncate, and os-ftruncate). The new limit is (1- (expt 2 63)) in size. This is about nine billion times larger that the old limit, which was 4 Gigabytes. (On 64-bit platforms, the maximum allowable size has always been (1- (expt 2 63)).)
Crypto: SHA1, HMAC and RC4 support
NT Service module -- The NT Service module was previously available as opensource, and it is now included in the product, with some minor enhancements and fixes.
Numerous Tutorials Added -- Additions to the Franz Tutorial page will be ongoing.

Enhancements:

Many compiler optimizations for improved performance
Major SOAP update --
- CLOS wrappers for SOAP structures
- built-in definitions for many Schema types
- new warning hierarchy
- new condition hierarchy
- access to element attributes in SOAP messages
- attribute values may be computed when message is composed
- top-level multiRef handling
- multiple SOAP Body elements
- access to encoding and content-type headers
- complete access to all the message components
- user extensions to WSDL code generators
Prolog improvements and speedups -- Significant features and performance enhancements are present in the updated Prolog.
aclrpc performance improvements
Significant hash table performance improvements
Improved socket I/O performance in multiprocessing environments
Improved blowfish support
/proc-less operation on Linux and FreeBSD -- Some IT administrators do not allow mounting of /proc, and now on Linux and FreeBSD Allegro works fine without access to /proc.

Minimum Supported Operating System Versions:

At this time, all current later operating system versions are known to work. Newly supported operating systems are in bold.

32-Bit:

FreeBSD (x86) 4.10
FreeBSD (x86) 5.2
HP-UX (PA-RISC) 11.00
IBM AIX (PowerPC) 5.1
Linux (PowerPC) with glibc 2.3 (e.g., Yellow Dog Linux 3.0)
Linux (x86) with glibc 2.2 (e.g., RH 7.3)
Mac OS X (PowerPC) 10.3
Solaris (SPARC) 2.8
Tru64 (Alpha) 5.1
Windows (x86) 2000, XP Home/Professional/Media Center, Server 2003

64-Bit:

HP-UX (PA-RISC) 11.00
IBM AIX (PowerPC) 5.1
Linux (AMD64) with glibc 2.3 (e.g., SuSE 9.0)
Mac OS X (PowerPC) 10.4
Solaris (SPARC) 2.8
Solaris (AMD64) 2.10
Tru64 (Alpha) 5.1