Deliriously yours: Sesame 2.0-beta1

It has happened! The Sesame developers finished the first beta of Sesame 2.0. This day marks a great moment in RDF development, as we have a successor to the very popular sesame1 server. Leobard says: well done guys, gratulations, enjoy, cherish, drink beer, a good reason to do mardi gras. Here the full annoncement, as received via e-mail:

We are ecstatic to be able to announce the first beta release of Sesame
2.0! Sesame 2.0-beta1 marks the end of architectural changes to Sesame 2
and allows us to focus on adding features and fixing bugs, and you to
finally see the Sesame 2 API as it is meant to be. You can find the
latest version in the download section at http://www.openrdf.org/ .

So what’s new in Sesame 2.0-beta1 compared to previous alpha releases?

* Repository, Sail and Query APIs stable.
We have moved from alpha-stage to beta-stage, meaning that the
core APIs, the interfaces and method signatures, are now frozen
and stable. This ensures that you as a developer will be able to
upgrade to future releases without fear of breaking your
application. See the JavaDoc API documentation and the user
documentation for more details.
* Improved Context Support.
We have improved the way Sesame handles contexts, allowing
developers to freely access any combination of zero, one or more
contexts in a single repository. Use of Java 5’s vararg feature
ensure a flexible, easy-to-use API.
* Sesame 2.0 Web Client.
beta1 features the first release of a web client for Sesame
servers. This web client can be deployed as a webapp and can be
used to conviently query and modify a Sesame repository running on
a (remote or local) Sesame 2.0 server.

For a more complete and detailed overview of changes, see the ChangeLog
at http://www.openrdf.org/ .

Of course, we would not call it beta if there were not some things
missing as well. Our ToDo list includes:

* A MySQL storage backend is under development but not yet available
in this rlease.
* Custom inferencing is not yet available.
* The SPARQL query engine does not yet support ordering and a few
other language features.
* Fine-grained security on repositories is not yet available.

As remarked before, this beta release marks an important step in Sesame
2.0 development: instead of focusing our development efforts on the core
structure and architecture we can now start paying attention to
(aforementioned and other) features. You can expect regular beta
releases as we add more of the ‘good stuff’.

Of course, we owe a great debt to the many contributors and
co-developers of Sesame 2. Thank you all for your patience, and we hope
you are as pleased with the result as we are.

Deliriously yours,
the OpenRDF development team
— Aduna – Guided Exploration www.aduna-software.com Prinses Julianaplein 14-b 3817 CS Amersfoort The Netherlands