4.1.0 released

I'm happy to announce that I just released JGroups 4.1.0!

Why the bump to a new minor version?

I had to make some API changes and - as I'm trying to avoid that in micro releases - I decided to bump the version to 4.1.0. The changes involve removing a few (rather exotic) JChannel constructors, but chances are you've never used any of them anyway. The other change is a signature change in Streamable, where I now throw IOExceptions and ClassNotFoundExceptions instead of simple Exceptions.

Here's a list of the major changes:

GraalVM / Quarkus support

• JGroups can now be compiled into a native executable using GraalVM's native-image. This is a very cool feature; I've used ProgrammaticUPerf2 to start a member in ~1 millisecond!
• This means JGroups can now be used by other applications to create native binaries. Not yet very polished, and I'll write a Quarkus extension next, but usable by folks who know GraalVM...
• I'll blog about the port to GraalVM and the Quarkus extension (once it's ready) next, so stay tuned!
• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2332
• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2341

 Parsing of network packets

• When using network sniffers, such as wireshark, tshark or tcpdump, the resulting PCAP files can be parsed by JGroups, displaying the contents of network packets as JGroups messages
• This can be done offline (e.g. reading a previously recorded PCAP file) or online (e.g. by piping the output of tshark into JGroups).
• I'll write a separate blog post about this shortly
• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2311
• Documentation: http://www.jgroups.org/manual4/index.html#_analyzing_wire_format_packets

Diagnostics handler without reflection

• This is related to the GraalVM port: the default DiagnosticsHandler (used by probe.sh) uses reflection, which is not allowed in GraalVM
• This additional DiagnosticsHandler can be used instead of the default one when creating a native binary of an application. The advantage is that probe.sh still works, even in a native binary.
• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2337

RpcDispatcher without reflection

• This is similar to the above bullet item: since reflection is not allowed in the GraalVM at runtime, reflective calls by RpcDispatcher would have to be defined in a config file passed to native-image, when creating a native binary. 
• I therefore added a way to invoke methods, without the need to use reflection
• For details see https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2338 or the documentation at http://www.jgroups.org/manual4/index.html#_methodlookup_and_methoddispatcher

 Probe: support when running under TCP

• Also required when running on GraalVM: since JGroups currently only supports TCP (MulticastSockets don't currently work on GraalVM), probe.sh needs to be given the address of *one* member, to fetch information about all members
• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2336

 Change in how IPv4/IPv6 addresses are picked

• The new algorithm centers around bind_addr defined in the transport (UDP, TCP, TCP_NIO2); the value of this address determines how other addresses (such as loopback, site_local, global, localhost or default values) are resolved.
• Example: if bind_addr=::1, then all other addresses that are not explicitly defined will be IPv6. If bind_addr=127.0.0.1, the all other addresses will be IPv4 addresses.
• The advantage of this is that you can run a JGroups stack using IPv4 and another one using IPv6 in the same process!
• https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JGRP-2343

A complete list of JIRA issues is at https://issues.jboss.org/projects/JGRP/versions/12341388. 
Please post questions/issues to the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/jgroups-dev.

Enjoy!