RELEASE-NOTES

Release notes for Peersim 1.0.5

This minor release fixes a number of small bugs, see CHANGELOG.

New features added:
- It is now possible to specify multiple configuration files in
  the command line; this enables the users to write their
  configuration files in a modular way.

Release notes for Peersim 1.0.4

This minor release fixes several small bugs, see CHANGELOG. 

New features added:
- Refactoring of EDSimulator to support the application of any event queue
  implementation. The even queue can now be configured to be any external 
  class implementing peersim.edsim.PriorityQ.
- Added some popular file formats to GraphPrinter (as well as GraphIO)
- Added a "background" parameter to PeakDistribution

Release notes for Peersim 1.0.3

This minor release fixes several small bugs, see CHANGELOG. 
No new features added.

Release notes for Peersim 1.0.2

This minor release fixes several small bugs:
- fixed a bug in RangeSimulator that was causing strange 
  "too many open files" errors when executing large simulations
- fixed minor bugs related to the Cleanable interface
  (credit goes to Samuel Bernard)
- fixed a bug in peersim.config.Operators was preventing the correct
  comparison of two values
- fixed a bug in examples.loadbalance.LBObserver 
- moved the ID creation before the creation of the Protocol objects
  belonging to a node; this solve problems for Protocols that
  assume that the ID field was filled.

New features added:
- the possibility of customizing the Random generator through
  a new configuration parameter (random). The specified generator
  must extend ExtendedRandom.
- a new transport class for trace initialization. Unlike
  KingParser, this class reads a more compact, binary format
  (described in the file).
- the possibility to shuffle iteration order without actually
  shuffling the nodes in the network. 
- a new example on using the event based engine, and also added
  a simple tutorial to the web page about it.
- a MemoryObserver reports to provide information about memory usage.
- modified peersim.vector.Getter and peersim.vector.GetterSetterFinder
  to handle boolean values as numbers (0/1). This enables to use class 
  from the vector package to perform statistics on boolean fields.
- added the VectorComparator class to be used to sort node
  arrays based on a specified getter.
  
  
==========================================================================

Release notes for Peersim 1.0.1

This minor release contains bug fixes only.

==========================================================================

Release notes for Peersim 1.0

The release of version 1.0 is a major milestone in the development of 
Peersim. Many useful features have been added, listed below in the 
"notable new features" section. But most importantly, we decided to take 
the  opportunity to fix some small design issues in both the API and the
configuration mechanism. This means that your code written for Peersim 
0.4 is not compatible with Peersim 1.0; furthermore, also some of the 
configuration parameters have been changed. Lucky enough, the changes
to be applied to your code and your config files are limited, and we 
believe that you will appreciate the increased clarity and ease of 
configuration of the new version.

Changes breaking backward compatibility:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- !Peersim now contains Java 1.5 features!, so you MUST use the JDK 1.5
  to run it. 
- The observer and dynamic distinction is gone. It was pretty artificial:
  both of them had access to the entire network, and nothing prevented
  an observer to modify the network or a dynamics to observe it. So,
  now all observer/dynamics classes have to implement the 
  peersim.core.Control interface, which contains only an execute()
  method. In the configuration file, the "dynamics." and "observer."
  prefixes have been substituted by the unique "control." prefix. 
- The following parameters names have been changed:
  overlay.node -> network.node
  overlay.size -> network.size
  overlay.maxSize -> network.maxSize
- Renamed a very popular class: now WireRegularRandom is WireKOut, which
  is the correct name for it. In the past it caused lots of confusion, we
  finally got rid of the bogus name.
- Renamed very popular parameters: instead of "degree", now every Wire* 
  class uses "k".
- GrowingNetwork is gone. Its functionality is provided by 
  DynamicNetwork. A small change though: config par "percentage" is no longer 
  supported, but you can set -1<add<1 which is taken as proportion.
- Removed the "simulation.shuffle" parameter, shuffling can now be
  added by the control cdsim.Shuffle. This way the time within the cycle and
  the schedule of the shuffling is as flexible as for any other control.
- CommonRandom is gone, look for field "r" in CommonState
- Classes to be created through the Configuration.getInstance(String) 
  mechanism MUST have a constructor accepting a single String parameter; constructors
  with a String,Object pair of parameters are not accepted any more.
  On the same subject, note that now in method getInstance(String,Object),
  the second argument is the default object which is returned if the
  configuration parameter defined by the string is not present.
- The vector package has been refactored to make it generic; now it is able
  to initialize/modify/observe any vector of protocols that have getter and
  setter methods; these protocols are not required to implement the 
  SingleValue interface, although the latter is still there for backward 
  compatibility and methods double getValue()/setValue(double) are the 
  default getter/setter.
- We got rid of CloneNotSupportedException in all clonings, so you'll have 
  to slightly modify your implementations to catch any exceptions thrown by 
  the superclass inside the method. This exception was annoying because 
  there is no way it can be thrown anyway.
  
Some of most notable new features:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- We modified the standard doclet in order to show an additional 
  "Parameters" section in the API documentation, which lists all the
  configuration parameters of the class, simplifying the reading of
  the documentation. Note, however, that due to the Sun License, 
  the new doclet cannot be redistributed; so if you try to compile
  your own documentation of Peersim, you may have several warnings
  from javadoc related to parameters.
- Refactored the cycle-based simulation engine so that it now only loads and 
  executes controls; calling the protocols is done by a control too. By default
  the old config files work. However, this modification makes it possible
  to totally freely order the controls and the execution of a cycle, and
  (with the help of NextCycle) it is possible to run only a subset of the
  protocols, some controls in between and then some other subset. These
  features however will be used only for hacking...
- Refactored and thoroughly tested the event-based simulator. The API
  description is ok, but still there is no tutorial for it. We plan
  to release something for it later (note the genericity of the
  term "later" ;-)
- Nodes are associated with unique numeric identifiers that can be obtained
  through Node.getID()
- Random seed is now explicitly set and printed to stderr before all
  experiments when using Simulator, also for simulation.experiments>1.
- Expression parsing has been cleaned up. Now, expression composed by
  all integer values are evaluated using integer arithmetics (e.g.,
  5/2 is equal to 2); while expressions containing at least one floating
  point value are evaluated using floating point arithmetics (e.g.,
  5/2.0 is equal to 2.5).
- Several new functionalities have been added to the peersim.dynamics
  and peersim.reports packages; please refer to the API documentation.