First alpha of 2.8

I've uploaded a first alpha of 2.8 to SourceForge [1].

The major new features are logical addresses, improved support for asymmetrical merges, GossipRouter changes, and a new shared dir based discovery protocol.

Despite its name, alpha3 is already very stable, and I wanted to release it so I can get some useful feedback to go into beta1. There are still ca 20 JIRA issues open, but I expect we close them and release GA by the summer 09.

The remaining tasks are hardening of the merging code (e.g. to better handle concurrent merges), dropping commons-logging (so we can ship jgroups.jar without any other JAR dependency !), testing asymmetric merges some more and writing documentation for these new features.

I want to thank Vladimir and Richard for their hard work on 2.8 !

Enjoy !

[1] https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6081&package_id=94868#