[ANN] BackgrounDRb release 1.0 available now

Hi Folks,

I am glad to announce 1.0 release of BackgrounDRb.

This would be a major release since 0.2 release of BackgrounDRb.

Here is a brief summary of changes:

- BackgrounDRb is DRb no longer. It makes use of EventDriven network
  programming library packet ( http://packet.googlecode.com ).

- Since we moved to packet, many nasty thread issues, result hash
  corruption issues are totally gone. Lots of work has went in
  making scheduler rock solid stable.

- Each worker, still runs in its own process, but each worker has a
  event loop of its own and all the events are triggered by the internal
  reactor loop. In a nutshell, you are not encouraged to use threads
  in your workers now. All the workers are already concurrent, but you
  are encouraged to use co-operative multitasking, rather than
  pre-emptive. A simple example is,

  For implement something like progress bar in old version of bdrb, you would:
    - start your processing a thread (so as your worker can receive
      further request from rails ) and have a instance
      variable ( protected by mutex ) which is updated on progress and
      can be send to rails.

    - With new backgroundrb, progress bar would be:
      process your damn request and just use register_status() to
      register status of your worker. Just because
      you are doing some processing won't mean that your worker will
      block. It can still receive requests from rails.


- Now, you can schedule multiple methods with their own triggers.

   | :schedules:
   |   :foo_worker:
   |     :foobar:
   |       :trigger_args: */5 * * * * * *
   |       :data: Hello World
   |     :barbar:
   |       :trigger_args: */10 * * * * * *

- Inside each worker, you can start tcp server or connect to a
  external server. Two important methods available in all workers are:

  start_server("localhost",port,ModuleName)
  connect("localhost",port,ModuleName)

  Connected client or outgoing connection would be integrated with
  Event Loop and you can process requests from these guys
  asynchronously. This mouse trap can allow you to build truly
  distributed workers across your network.

- Each worker comes with a "thread_pool" object, which can be used
  to run tasks concurrently. For example:

    thread_pool.defer(url) { |url| scrap_wiki_content(url) }

- Each worker has access to method "register_status" which can be
  used to update status of worker or store results. Results of a worker
  can be retrieved even after a worker has died.

  By default the results would be saved in master process memory, but
  you can configure BackgrounDRb to store these results in a memcache
  server or a cluster using following option in configuration file:

      # backgroundrb.yml

      | :backgroundrb:
      |   :port: 11006
      |   :ip: 0.0.0.0
      |   :log: foreground
      |   :result_storage:
      |     :memcache: "10.10.10.2:11211,10.10.10.6:11211"


- Relevant URLs:
** Home Page: http://backgroundrb.rubyforge.org
** SVN : http://svn.devjavu.com/backgroundrb/trunk
** Bug Reports/Ticks: http://backgroundrb.devjavu.com/report

- Credits :
** Ezra Zygmuntowicz,skaar for taking BackgrounDRb so far.
** Kevin for helping out with OSX issues.
** Andy for patches and initial testing.
** Paul for patching up README.
** Other initial users.
** Matz, Francis for general inspiration.


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conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my
own coals.

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