Spread 4.0.0 release

Hi everyone,

The big release day continues... Spread 4 is a major release with new 
features which I hope you all find useful. 

Spread 4.0.0  http://www.spread.org

Spread Concepts LLC, Johns Hopkins University's Distributed Systems 
and Networks Lab and George Washington University's Experimental 
Networked Systems Lab are happy to announce the release of a 
new stable version, 4.0.0, of the Spread toolkit. 

The Spread 4 release is a major new release for the Spread project. This 
release includes several highly requested new features that:

1) Improve manageability by allowing dynamic configuration of sets 
   of daemons without requiring a restart;
2) Improve performance;
3) Ease the development of Spread based applications with better 
   membership reporting;
4) Support multi-threaded forking client applications;
5) Integrate a Virtual Synchrony interface;
6) Provide simpler membership APIs;
7) Organize and improve the software build for both Windows and 
   Unix systems. 

It also includes the usual collection of bug fixes. Details of the new 
capabilities can be found in the TransitioningFromSpread_3.pdf document 
included in the distribution and available on the website.

This release does have some specific API changes, so some (not all)
applications may need small source code changes in order to continue
to work. Extensive documentation is available in the docs directory in
the distributions.

We believe this release is stable and provides a solid platform for
Spread applications, however, because of the API changes it is not a
drop in replacement for current applications.  So we highly encourage
anyone working on new applications to use this release. Those
currently running Spread applications should determine the best time
for a switch to Spread 4.

Spread is a toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service
that is resilient to faults across external or internal
networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed
applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast
and group communication support. Spread services range from reliable
message passing to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees,
even in case of computer failures and network partitions.

Please be aware, that under the Spread Open Source License, the toolkit may 
be freely used only under some conditions. For example, the license includes 
the requirement that all advertising materials (including web pages) 
mentioning software that uses Spread display a specific acknowledgment. 
Please review the license agreement for more details.
http://www.spread.org/license/

Other commercial licenses or other licensing arrangements are available. 
Please contact info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

Jonathan 
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Jonathan R. Stanton         jonathan@xxxxxxxxxx
Dept. of Computer Science   
Johns Hopkins University    
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