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I’ve had two successive Marionette Collective releases recently, I was hoping to have one big one but I was waiting for the Stomp maintainers to do a release and it was taking a while.

These two releases are both major feature releases covering major feature sets. See lower down for a breakdown of it all.

We’re nearing feature completeness for the SimpleRPC layer as I am adding a number of features of interest to Enterprise and Large users especially around security and web UIs.

Once we’re at the end of this cycle I’ll do a 1.0.0 release and then from there move onto the next major feature cycle. The next cycle will focus on queuing long running tasks, background scheduling, future scheduling of tasks and a lot of related work. I posted some detail about these plans to the list recently.

Over the new few days or weeks I’ll do a number of Screencasts exploring some of these new features in depth, for now the list of what’s new:

Security

Connectivity

We can use Ruby Gem Stomp 1.1.6 which brings a lot of enhancements:

  • Connection pools for failover between multiple ActiveMQs
  • Lots of tunables about the connection pools such as retry frequencies etc
  • SSL TLS between node and ActiveMQ

Writing Web and Dynamic UIs

  • A DDL that describes agents, inputs and outputs:
    • Creates auto generated documentation
    • Can be used to auto generate user interfaces
    • The client library will only make requests that validate against the DDL
    • In future input validations will move into the DDL and will be done automatically for you
  • Web UI’s can bypass or do their own discovery and use the DDL to auto generate user interfaces

Usability

  • Fire-and-Forget style requests, for when you just want something done but do not care about results, these requests are very quick as they do not do any discovery.
  • Agents can now be reloaded without restarting the daemon
  • A new mc-inventory tool that can be used to view facts, agents and classes for a node
  • Many UI enhancements to the CLI tools