====================================================================== CHANGES for Ice 3.3.1 ====================================================================== The entries below contain brief descriptions of the changes in a release, in no particular order. Some of the entries reflect significant new additions, while others represent minor corrections. Although this list is not a comprehensive report of every change we made in a release, it does provide details on the changes we feel Ice users might need to be aware of. We recommend that you use the release notes included in your Ice distribution as a guide for migrating your applications to this release, and the Ice manual for complete details on a particular aspect of Ice. Note that this file only includes changes since Ice 3.2.1. For the change history of prior releases, refer to the CHANGES file in the subdirectory of each language mapping (e.g., cpp/CHANGES). ====================================================================== Changes since version 3.3.0 ====================================================================== General Changes =============== These entries apply to all relevant language mappings unless otherwise noted. - Fixed a bug where ice_getCachedConnection could throw if called shortly after connection establishment failed. - Fixed an IceGrid bug where an application update could trigger the deactivation of all session-activated servers even if these servers were not updated. - The frequency at which Ice checks for connections that can be reaped by active connection management (ACM) is now set by default to 10% of the smallest, non-zero ACM setting (Ice.ACM.Client and Ice.ACM.Server), with a minimum value of 5 seconds and a maximum value of 5 minutes. This default can be overridden by setting Ice.MonitorConnections, which is no longer deprecated, and whose value is the check frequency in seconds. - Fixed a bug in IceBox where services using the shared communicator would be passed the wrong communicator if re-started with the IceBox service manager interface. - Improved Glacier2 to automatically destroy the client session if the forwarding of a request from a back-end server to the client fails with an unrecoverable error. This is particularly useful for clients that receive requests from back-end servers on a regular basis and disable the Glacier2 session timeout. If for some reason the client becomes unreachable, Glacier2 will eventually destroy the client session (assuming timeouts are properly configured on the Glacier2 client endpoints). - Added support for updating locator cache endpoints in the background if the new Ice.BackgroundLocatorCacheUpdates property is set to 1. Locator cache updates are triggered if the proxy locator cache timeout is configured and the cached endpoints are older than the configured timeout. By default, locator cache updates are performed before making an invocation, delaying the invocation until the new endpoints are retrieved from the locator. With this feature enabled, the locator cache updates are performed in the background and the invocation that triggered the update uses the previously cached endpoints. - Optimized the Ice client run time to minimize locator requests when multiple concurrent or AMI requests need to resolve the endpoints of the same well-known object, object adapter, or replica group. - Fixed a bug in IceGrid that would cause it to generate incorrect configuration files for servers whose ice-version was set to a version previous to Ice 3.3.0. - Fixed a bug in the Slice translators that prevented them from being run from a directory without write permissions, even if no output files were being written to the directory. - Fixed a bug where retried AMI calls could cause the timer thread to print an error message if the retry failed and if Ice.RetryIntervals was configured with non-zero time intervals. - All error output from the Slice compilers now goes to stderr. - Made unmarshaling code robust against messages containing invalid indexes for class instances. - Fixed IcePatch2 to handle non-ASCII file names properly. - Fixed a bug in IceGrid that could cause the registry to fail with an assertion if an application is synchronized concurrently by multiple administrative clients (or by nodes started with the --deploy option). - IceGrid locator implementation changes: * Fixed a bug where the registry could crash when resolving the endpoints of a replica group if some servers were activating concurrently. * Fixed a bug where the registry could hang when resolving the endpoints of a round-robin replica group if a member of the replica group was removed concurrently. * Improved the scalability of the locator implementation to better handle a high volume of concurrent requests. The registry now limits the number of invocations to the IceGrid nodes to get the object adapter endpoints. - A Slice compiler now removes any files it has generated during the current execution if it fails or is interrupted. - The Slice compilers that support the --depend option now use an exit status of 1 if a failure occurs while generating dependencies. In previous releases the compilers used an exit status of 0. - Fixed a bug in the iceca script that prevented the command "init --overwrite" from working properly on Windows. - Fixed a bug where the IceBox shared communicator ignored Ice communicator properties specified in an IceBox service configuration file. - Fixed a bug where Ice plug-ins could be destroyed more than once. - Fixed several issues in the IceGrid GUI. C++ Changes =========== - Changed the thread pool to ensure that references to AMI callback objects are released as soon as possible. - Fixed bug in slice2cpp that caused bad code to be generated for classes and modules whose name was a C++ keyword. - Fixed a bug in IceSSL where the IceSSL.CheckCertName property did not have any effect. - Fixed icegridadmin `service list' command crash. - Fixed a bug where slice2cpp and slice2freeze would generate absolute include paths if the command line option "-I." was used. - Fixed a Freeze transactional evictor bug that could cause the transaction of an asynchronous method dispatch to be rolled back if rollback on user exception was enabled. - Fixed a bug that could cause the first invocation on a proxy to incorrectly be sent compressed or not compressed. - Fixed a bug on Windows that could cause an interrupted application to spin for a while before terminating. Java Changes ============ - Slice types now implement java.io.Serializable. - If a servant raises OutOfMemoryError while dispatching an operation, the Ice run time now traps it and treats it as a hard error, meaning Ice logs an error message and closes the connection on which the request was received. - Added object serialization that allows native Java objects to be sent as operation parameters. See the Slice chapter and the Java language mapping chapter in the manual for more information. - Fixed bug in slice2java that caused bad code to be generated for a class whose name was a Java keyword if the class contained data members. - The path names specified by the IceSSL.Keystore, IceSSL.Truststore, and IceSSL.Random properties can now refer to class path resources. - Added methods to the IceSSL plug-in to allow keystores, truststores, and RNG seeds to be specified using input streams. - Fixed the IceSSL.ConnectionInfo type so that the "incoming" and "adapterName" members are public. - Added support for using Ice in an applet, along with a new demo. C# Changes ========== - Added object serialization that allows native C# objects to be sent as operation parameters. See the Slice chapter and the C# language mapping chapter in the manual for more information. - Changed the Ice run time to no longer rely on .NET worker threads to start asynchronous I/O operations. - Fixed a bug in slice2cs that caused a core dump if a dictionary had a value type of Object. - Fixed a bug in slice2cs that caused incorrect code to be generated if an operation had a parameter named "ex". - Fixed a bug in slice2cs that caused incorrect code to be generated if a Slice class used the property mapping and also applied a ["cs:attribute:..."] metadata directive to a data member. - Fixed an issue that could cause an application to fail to start if Ice was unable to load an assembly that was referenced (but not required) by the program and not present on the system. - Fixed a bug in marshaling code that caused a trailing zero byte to be marshaled for user exceptions without class data members. - Fixed a bug in slice2cs that caused incorrect code to be generated for a dictionary that used a structure as the key type. - Fixed a bug in slice2cs that caused incorrect code to be generated for a sequence whose element type is a structure that uses the class mapping. Python Changes ============== - Implemented the Ice.Trace.Slicing property for user exceptions. - It is now possible to pass a sequence of 64-bit integer values using an object that supports the buffer protocol. - Fixed a bug in the constructors of user-defined types that have structures as data members. Consider this example: // Slice struct Point { int x; int y; }; struct Event { Point location; ... }; The Event constructor supplied a default instance of the Point member if the caller did not supply one. However, this default instance was unintentionally shared by all Event objects that omitted a value for the Point member during construction. The generated code now ensures that each instance of Event assigns a new instance of Point. - Fixed bugs in getImplicitContext related to using it when an implicit context had not been set. - Fixed bugs in stringToProxy and propertyToProxy related to null proxies. - Ice.getSliceDir() now only searches for the "slice" directory in a standard Ice installation. - Improved the way the build system locates the Python framework on Mac OS X. Ruby Changes ============ - The translator now generates an eql? method for Slice structures. - Implemented the Ice.Trace.Slicing property for user exceptions. - Added helper Ice.getSliceDir, which locates the "slice" directory in a standard Ice installation. PHP Changes =========== - It is now possible to specify multiple Slice files in your profile configuration that have common include files. For example, if A.ice and B.ice both include Common.ice, you can now do the following: ice.slice=-I. A.ice B.ice In previous releases this would have caused a redefinition error, which you could work around by creating a single Slice file that included both A.ice and B.ice. This workaround is no longer necessary. - Fixed bugs in the ice_router and ice_locator proxy methods. ====================================================================== Changes since version 3.2.1 ====================================================================== General Changes =============== These entries apply to all relevant language mappings unless otherwise noted. - It is now possible to use UNC paths on Windows in the configuration of Ice services, such as in the value of the IceGrid.Node.Data property for an IceGrid node. - Fixed bug in slice2html that caused incorrect hyperlinks to be generated if nested modules were used. - Added support for non-blocking AMI and batch requests. Activities such as DNS lookups, endpoint resolution, connection establishment, and sending the request are now performed in the background if necessary. - AMI requests now return a boolean to indicate if the request is sent synchronously. If not sent synchronously and the AMI callback implements the Ice::AMISentCallback interface, the Ice run time calls the ice_sent() method once the request is sent. - AMI timeouts are no longer triggered by the connection monitor thread at regular time intervals. Instead, timeouts are now triggered on time just like synchronous invocations. As a result, the setting of the Ice.MonitorConnections is no longer useful and this property has been deprecated. - Added the proxy methods ice_flushBatchRequests() and ice_flushBatchRequests_async() to flush the batch requests of the connection associated with the proxy. Like AMI requests, the ice_flushBatchRequests_async() method is guaranteed to not block. - Added support for oneway AMI requests. The ice_response() method of the AMI callback is never called for oneway requests sent with AMI. Unlike regular oneway requests which might block until the request is passed to the TCP/IP stack, oneway AMI requests can't block. - Removed the thread-per-connection (TPC) concurrency model. Applications that were using TPC for its ordering guarantees can use the new thread pool serialization feature. - The Ice thread pool now supports a new serialization mode that serializes the processing of messages received over a connection. For example, this is useful when you want to ensure the orderly dispatching of oneway requests from a client even if the thread pool has multiple threads. Serialization is enabled by setting the thread pool's Serialize property to 1. - An Ice server will now abort() if there are no more file descriptors available to accept incoming connections. Note that this behavior is subject to change in the final release. - An IceGrid node is more conservative when removing the directory of a server. The node only removes the directory when the server is explicitly removed from a deployed application or if the directory contains only files and directories that were created by the node. - IceGrid's round-robin load balancing policy better handles servers that are unreachable. - Fixed an IceGrid bug where patching servers deployed with the attribute `application-distrib' set to false wouldn't work. - Added an object adapter to the IceGrid registry. The adapter is named `IceGrid.Registry.AdminSessionManager' and is responsible for Glacier2 administrative sessions. - When resolving the endpoints of a replica group, the IceGrid locator no longer waits for an object adapter to complete its activation if another adapter is already active. - Fixed an IceGrid descriptor bug where re-opening an unnamed property set would cause multiple property definitions. - Added a fix to prevent the IceGrid node from printing an annoying thread pool size warning on startup. - Fixed IceGrid bug where updates to IceBox services were not correctly sent to the IceGrid GUI or to IceGrid registry slaves. - The IceGrid node now unblocks the SIGHUP, SIGINT and SIGTERM signals from forked servers. - The IceGrid node now prints a warning if it can't reach the IceGrid registry when it starts. This warning can be disabled with --nowarn. - An IceBox service can now recursively start and stop other IceBox services from within its start and stop methods. The level of recursion is limited to the threads in the administrative object adapter's thread pool. - Configuration properties for IceBox services can now be defined on the command line. - IceBox services that share a communicator now use a dedicated communicator instance that is not used by the IceBox server. This dedicated communicator only inherits properties from the server's communicator if IceBox.InheritProperties is set to a non-zero value. - It is no longer necessary to define a value for the property IceBox.ServiceManager.Endpoints. If this property is not defined, the ServiceManager interface is not available. - Changes related to Highly-Available IceStorm - IceStorm now supports master/slave replication with automatic failover. - IceStorm also supports a transient mode that uses no databases. This mode is enabled using the new property .Transient. Replication is not supported in this mode. - Subscriptions are now persistent (except in transient mode). - Added a new Quality of Service (QoS) parameter, retryCount, to control when subscribers are removed. IceStorm automatically removes a subscriber after the specified number of unsuccessful event deliveries. The default value of retryCount is 0, meaning the subscriber is removed immediately upon any failure. A subscriber is always removed on a hard failure, which is defined as the occurrence of ObjectNotExistException or NotRegisteredException. - The IceStorm database format has changed. Use the utility icestormmigrate to migrate from the database formats of Ice 3.1.1 and Ice 3.2.1. The old migration script (updateicestorm.py) has been removed. - Added the new C++ example demo/IceStorm/replication2, which demonstrates how to manually configure IceStorm replication. - Added the "replica" command to icestormadmin to get debugging information on IceStorm replication. - The TopicManager object adapter now uses its own thread pool in the replicated case to ensure that ordering is guaranteed by default even if a publisher uses a oneway proxy. - Upon shutdown IceStorm now guarantees that all received events are delivered to all subscribers. - Added Topic::getNonReplicatedPublisher, which always return a non-replicated publisher proxy. - All IceStorm properties must be prefixed with the service name. For example, consider the following IceBox service configuration: IceBox.Service.Foo=IceStormService,33:createIceStorm ... In this case the IceStorm configuration properties must use the "Foo" prefix, such as Foo.Discard.Interval=10 - Removed the icestormadmin Slice checksum check. This avoids warnings when using icestormadmin against an older version of IceStorm. - It is now possible to specify properties in a config file with space, '#' or '=' in either the key or value string. It is necessary to escape '#' and '=' as '\#' and '\='. Leading or trailing spaces are only allowed in keys and need to be escaped as '\ '. - Properties set programmatically can no longer have leading or trailing whitespace in the key. - There is no longer a limit on the allowable length of a property line in an Ice config file. Previously the limit was 1024. - The new property Ice.Warn.UnusedProperties causes the communicator to display a warning during its destruction that lists all properties that were set but whose values were never read. - The way that the Ice run time determines whether a proxy invocation is eligible for collocation optimization has changed somewhat. The Ice run time no longer performs a DNS lookup; instead, invocations on a direct proxy will use the optimization only if the host and port of one of its endpoints match the host and port of an endpoint or published endpoint of an object adapter from the same communicator. - Exceptions thrown from collocation-optimized invocations are now fully transparent. If an operation throws an exception that is not in the operation's exception specification, or throws a non-Ice exception, the client receives UnknownUserException or UnknownException, exactly as if the servant for a remote invocation had thrown the same exception. (In earlier versions, the client received the original exception, rather than an unknown exception.) For Ice run-time exceptions, all run-time exceptions are passed to the client as UnknownLocalException, except for - ObjectNotExistException - FacetNotExistException - OperationNotExistException - OperationNotExistException - UnknownException - UnknownLocalException - UnknownUserException - CollocationOptimizationException - The property Ice.Default.CollocationOptimization and the proxy property .CollocationOptimization have been deprecated and replaced by Ice.Default.CollocationOptimized and .CollocationOptimized, respectively. - Most proxy factory methods now return a proxy of the same type as the original and no longer require the use of a checked or unchecked cast. For example, in C++ you can write HelloPrx hello = ...; hello = hello->ice_oneway(); Previously you would have needed a cast, such as hello = HelloPrx::uncheckedCast(hello->ice_oneway()); In Java and .NET, you must use a type cast: hello = (HelloPrx)hello.ice_oneway(); - If a proxy contains a host that is multihomed, the client will now try all the available IP addresses. Previously, only the first in the address list returned by the DNS was used and others were ignored. - It's now possible to change the compression setting for a fixed proxy. In previous releases, calling ice_compress on a fixed proxy would raise Ice::FixedProxyException. - Added a new skipEncapsulation method to the Ice::InputStream interface. This method can be used to skip an encapsulation when reading from a stream. - The endEncapsulation method from the Ice::InputStream interface will now throw Ice::EncapsulationException if not all the data from the encapsulation has been read. - The marshaling code now throws an exception if an enumerator that is out of range for its enumeration is sent or received. - Network tracing now also includes failures to connect if the Ice.Trace.Network property is set to 2. - The property Ice.Trace.Location has been deprecated and replaced by Ice.Trace.Locator. - The Ice locator tracing (enabled with the `Ice.Trace.Locator' property) now traces calls to locator registry when an object adapter updates its endpoints or the server process proxy is registered. - The new property Ice.TCP.Backlog allows you to specify the size of incoming connection backlog for TCP/IP sockets. This setting is also used for SSL. In C++ the default value is SOMAXCONN or 511 if that macro is not defined. In Java and .NET the default value is 511. - Added support for IPv6. It is disabled by default but can be enabled using the configuration property Ice.IPv6. The property Ice.IPv4 can be used to disable IPv4 support. - Added support for UDP multicast. - A new object adapter property, .ProxyOptions, lets you customize the proxies that the adapter creates. - Added a new operation to the ObjectAdapter interface named refreshPublishedEndpoints(). This operation allows you to update an adapter's published endpoints after a change in the available local interfaces or after a change to the PublishedEndpoints property. - The "-h *" endpoint option is now only valid for object adapter endpoints. It can no longer be used in proxy endpoints or object adapter published endpoints. - Ice now listens on INADDR_ANY for object adapter endpoints that do not contain a host name (or are set to use "-h *" or "-h 0.0.0.0"). Previously, Ice would only listen on the local interfaces that were present when the adapter was created. - Accepting incoming connections can no longer block a thread from a server thread pool. This includes activities such as connection validation and SSL handshaking. - Changed servant locators so both locate() and finished() can throw user exceptions. - Improved Glacier2 to take advantage of the new non-blocking aspects of Ice. Glacier2 now uses the thread pool concurrency model and, in buffered mode, Glacier2 only uses a single thread to forward queued requests. As a result, Glacier2 now requires a fixed number of threads regardless of the number of connected clients. - Glacier2 filters are now disabled by default for IceGrid client and administrative sessions created with the IceGrid session managers. If you rely on these filters being enabled, you must now explicitly set the property IceGrid.Registry.SessionFilters or IceGrid.Registry.AdminSessionFilters. - The use of sequences (and structs containing sequences) as valid dictionary keys has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release. - slice2vb has been removed from the distribution and is no longer supported. To use Visual Basic .NET with Ice, use slice2cs to generate C# code from Slice definitions, and then use a C# compiler to create a DLL from the generated code. Then link against that DLL in your Visual Basic project. - Fixed a variety of bugs with slice2cpp where incorrect code would be generated when C++ reserved words are used as Slice identifiers. - If a class, interface, or exception has a base, slice2html now generates a hyperlink to the base. (Previously, only the name of the base was shown, without a hyperlink.) - slice2html now generates documentation for Slice constant definitions. - slice2html now generates the scoped name for the

element of each page instead of the unqualified name. For example, it now shows "Ice::DNSException" instead of "DNSException". - The ability to install a logger via the Ice.LoggerPlugin property has been removed. The new mechanism requires that you create an instance of the Ice::LoggerPlugin class in your plug-in factory. Please see the manual for more details. - It is no longer possible to provide input files on the command line for icestormadmin or icegridadmin. - Freeze evictor update: - the existing evictor was renamed BackgroundSaveEvictor - added new TransactionalEvictor - Fixed a bug in FreezeScript that caused a failure when a script attempted to access the 'length' member of a string value. - Added support for string concatenation in FreezeScript using the '+' operator. - dumpdb output now goes to stdout. C++ Changes =========== - Fixed icepatch2server crash on exit bug. - Fixed race condition in IceUtil::Cache. - Changed the string methods in InputStream and OutputStream to accept an optional boolean argument. If true (the default), strings are processed by the string converter (if any) before marshaling or unmarshaling. If false, the string converter is bypassed. No source code changes are necessary for existing programs. - The new Ice::StringConverterPlugin class allows you to install a custom string converter and/or wstring converter during communicator initialization. - The Ice shared library now provides a string converter plug-in factory: createStringConverter. See the Ice manual for details. - IceUtil::stringToWstring and IceUtil::wstringToString now take a second argument of type ConversionFlags. It can be either strictConversion or lenientConversion. The default is lenientConversion for compatibility with previous releases. See the Ice manual for further details. - Added IceGrid secure demo to demonstrate how to setup a secure IceGrid deployment. - Fixed a Glacier2 assert that would occur if the configuration defined only the SSL permissions verifier. - The IceUtil::Timer destroy method no longer joins with the timer execution thread if it's called from a timer task. Instead, the thread is detached. - The IceUtil::Timer schedule and scheduleRepeated methods now throw IceUtil::IllegalArgumentException if the timer is destroyed. - Fixed potential Slice parser assert. - Added an HA IceStorm template to config/templates.xml. - Removed the index parameter from the IceStorm template. - It is now possible to manually configure the node proxies when using HA IceStorm in conjunction with IceGrid. - iceca and associated ImportKey.class are now copied into bin and lib respectively. - iceca did not correctly support the --verbose flag with the import command. - iceca request has been simplified. The command now takes the name of the file to generate, the common name, and an optional email address. - The iceca ImportKey.class utility is now installed in /usr/share/Ice-3.3.0 for an RPM install or ${prefix}/lib otherwise. - The following APIs were deprecated in Ice 3.1 and have been removed: Application::main(int, char*[], const char*, const Ice::LoggerPtr&) initializeWithLogger initializeWithProperties initializeWithPropertiesAndLogger stringToIdentity identityToString ObjectPrx::ice_hash ObjectPrx::ice_communicator ObjectPrx::ice_newIdentity ObjectPrx::ice_newContext ObjectPrx::ice_newFacet ObjectPrx::ice_newAdapterId ObjectPrx::ice_newEndpoints ObjectPrx::ice_collocationOptimization ObjectPrx::ice_connection - Added "public" keyword to the definition of IceSSL::PublicKey. - Fixed a bug in slice2freeze in which it was not properly handling the "cpp:type:wstring" metadata, which would result in narrow strings being used in generated code when wstring should have been used instead. - IceInternal::GCShared now derives from IceUtil::Shared. This now makes it possible to have a servant class derived from IceUtil::Thread (which, previously, was impossible). - The thread stack size specified with the IceUtil::Thread::start() method parameter is now adjusted to PTHREAD_STACK_MIN if it's inferior to it. On Mac OS X, it's also adjusted to the next closest multiple of the page size (4KB). - Added a new overloading of the Ice::createInputStream method: Ice::InputStreamPtr createInputStream( const CommunicatorPtr&, const pair< const Byte*, const Byte*>&); - Fixed a bug in the encoding of user exceptions with a class attribute and returned by AMD-dispatched invocations. An extra byte was encoded at the end. This fix doesn't affect on the wire compatibility with old Ice clients. - Added what() member to IceUtil::Exception, so a single catch handler can be used for Ice exceptions: try { // Call something that may throw an Ice exception } catch(const ::std::exception& ex) { cerr << ex.what() << endl; // Works for any ::std::exception, // including Ice exceptions } what() is implemented in terms of ice_print(), so overriding ice_print() also changes the string returned by what(). Java Changes ============ - Fixed the slice2java ant task to redirect stderr output so that messages from the preprocessor are not interpreted as dependencies. - Fixed the slice2java ant task to recompile all of the files in the file list if at least one of the files has changed and checksums are being generated. - Deprecated the class IceUtil.Version. - Added the methods stringVersion and intVersion to Ice.Util for obtaining the Ice version. - Fixed a NullPointerException thrown when allocating an InputStream with an empty buffer. - Fixed a NullPointerException thrown when calling startEncapsulation on an OutputStream. - The following APIs were deprecated in Ice 3.1 and have been removed: Application.main(String, String[], String, Logger) Util.initializeWithLogger Util.initializeWithProperties Util.initializeWithPropertiesAndLogger ObjectPrx.ice_hash ObjectPrx.ice_communicator ObjectPrx.ice_newIdentity ObjectPrx.ice_newContext ObjectPrx.ice_newFacet ObjectPrx.ice_newAdapterId ObjectPrx.ice_newEndpoints ObjectPrx.ice_collocationOptimization ObjectPrx.ice_connection - Ice for Java now supports the ICE_CONFIG environment variable. - The Java2 language mapping is now deprecated. - Added support for a password callback in IceSSL. Also added new properties for specifying the name of a password callback class or certificate verifier class. - LocalObject is now mapped to java.lang.Object; an out LocalObject parameter is still mapped to an Ice.LocalObjectHolder object. Ice.LocalObjectHolder now holds a java.lang.Object. The interface Ice.LocalObject and the abstract class Ice.LocalObjectImpl are now deprecated. - Ice.LocalException and Ice.UserException now implement java.lang.Cloneable. - Fixed the generated hashCode method to prevent NullPointerException. .NET Changes ============ - Added the methods stringVersion and intVersion to Ice.Util for obtaining the Ice version. - Fixed a NullReferenceException thrown when allocating an InputStream with an empty buffer. - Fixed a NullReferenceException thrown when calling startEncapsulation on an OutputStream. - Changed Ice.Exception to derive from System.Exception rather than System.ApplicationException in accordance with Microsoft's recommendations for writing custom exceptions. - The following APIs were deprecated in Ice 3.1 and have been removed: Application.main(string, string[], string, Logger) Util.initializeWithLogger Util.initializeWithProperties Util.initializeWithPropertiesAndLogger ObjectPrx.ice_hash ObjectPrx.ice_communicator ObjectPrx.ice_newIdentity ObjectPrx.ice_newContext ObjectPrx.ice_newFacet ObjectPrx.ice_newAdapterId ObjectPrx.ice_newEndpoints ObjectPrx.ice_collocationOptimization ObjectPrx.ice_connection - The Ice.Application class now supports signal handling on Mono. - Added the build macro MANAGED, which can be enabled if you want to build a version of the Ice run time that uses only managed code. - Improved marshaling performance for Ice for .NET. This particularly affects programs running under Mono on big-endian machines, where marshaling performance of sequences improves by up to a factor of 10. For little-endian machines (both Windows and Mono), marshaling performance is also improved. - Added ice_name() method to exceptions, in keeping with the C++ and Java convention. The method returns the Slice type ID of exception, without a leading "::" qualifier. - Fixed a bug that caused a NullPointer exception for sequences of structs if the structs used the class mapping and the sequence contained null elements. - Fixed a bug that caused a NullPointer exception when marshaling a struct containing reference types if that was nested inside a data type, such as another exception or struct. - Added support for a password callback in IceSSL. Also added new properties for specifying the name of a password callback class or certificate verifier class. See manual for more details. - Fixed a bug in slice2cs that caused incorrect code to be generated for data members of classes and structures that used the ["clr:property"] metadata directive. - Fixed a bug in slice2cs that caused incorrect code to be generated for Slice exceptions with data members that had the same name as one of the data members of System.ApplicationException. - The metadata directive "cs:collection" is no longer valid. Use ["clr:collection"] instead. - Added a new mapping for Slice sequences to use C# 2.0 generics: // Slice ["clr:generic:List"] sequence S; maps to: // C# System.Collections.Generic.List S; This also works for types other than List. Please see the manual for more details. - Added a new mapping for Slice dictionaries to use C# 2.0 generics: // Slice dictionary D; maps to: // C# System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary D; The previous mapping to the .NET 1.1 DictionaryBase class is still supported with the "clr:collection" metadata directive. - LocalObject is now mapped to System.Object. The interface Ice.LocalObject and the abstract class Ice.LocalObjectImpl are now deprecated. - The Ice.Util.proxyIdentityCompare and proxyIdentityAndFacetCompare methods are now using string.CompareOrdinal to compare the identity category, name and the facet instead of string.Compare with the CultureInfo.InvariantCulture culture-specific information. - Ice.LocalException and Ice.UserException now implement System.ICloneable. - Ice for C# has been renamed Ice for .NET and the assemblies have been renamed as well. For example icecs.dll is now just Ice.dll. Python Changes ============== - Fixed a bug that occurred when converting an Ice.Identity object to a string via str(). In prior releases, this conversion used the global method Ice.identityToString, but that method is no longer supported. As a result, the output now resembles that of other user-defined types. - Added the methods Ice.stringVersion and Ice.intVersion. - Unicode objects are now accepted as arguments (or data members of arguments) to remote Slice operations. The local Ice API still uses 8-bit strings. - Added new Ice/converter demo to illustrate how to use the new Ice for C++ string converter plug-in. This demo is very similar to the C++ demo. - Fixed a deadlock bug that could occur when a multithreaded client executes Slice operations that return abstract objects by value. - Removed "#!/usr/bin/env python" where unnecessary. - Added ice_staticId() method to generated Slice classes. - The following APIs were deprecated in Ice 3.1 and have been removed: initializeWithLogger initializeWithProperties initializeWithPropertiesAndLogger identityToString stringToIdentity ObjectPrx.ice_communicator ObjectPrx.ice_newIdentity ObjectPrx.ice_newContext ObjectPrx.ice_newFacet ObjectPrx.ice_newAdapterId ObjectPrx.ice_newEndpoints ObjectPrx.ice_connection - Fixed a bug where returning an AMD servant from a ServantLocator would cause a deadlock in the IcePy extension. - Added support for blobjects. - Fixed a code generation bug with slice2py where the proxy type for a Python reserved word would be incorrectly named. For example, interface def would generate a proxy class named _defPrx, not the correct class name defPrx. - LocalObject is now mapped to the Python base 'object' type. The class Ice.LocalObject is now deprecated. - Fixed a bug in Ice.initialize that would cause a crash if the configuration file specified by --Ice.Config was not found. Ruby Changes ============ - Added the methods Ice::stringVersion and Ice::intVersion. - Removed "#!/usr/bin/env ruby" where unnecessary. - Added ice_staticId() method to generated Slice classes. - Fixed a code generation bug with slice2rb where the reserved words BEGIN and END would generate classes, modules and constants named _BEGIN, and _END which is illegal. They now generate BEGIN_ and END_. - Fixed a bug where marshaling a plain object proxy fails with an uninitialized constant exception. PHP Changes =========== - Constructors are now generated for Slice structure, exception, and class types. Constructor parameters supply default values for each data member. - A null value is now allowed where a sequence or dictionary value is expected. - Added the methods Ice_stringVersion and Ice_intVersion. - Removed the undocumented PHP constants ICE_STRING_VERSION and ICE_INT_VERSION. - LocalObject is now mapped to PHP's base object type. The interface Ice.LocalObject and the abstract class Ice.LocalObjectImpl are now deprecated. - Added support for an optional context argument to ice_checkedCast and ice_uncheckedCast. - Added the following proxy methods: ice_getRouter/ice_router ice_getLocator/ice_locator - Added the translator option "-w" to suppress warnings during Slice translation.