Fudge Messaging 0.2 Release

After I initially announced the first release of the Fudge Messaging project, we've had a lot of feedback on the code and on the specification, and we've been using it in anger quite a bit here at OpenGamma.

We've also been making a lot of enhancements, and are pleased to announce the 0.2 Release of the combined Fudge Messaging project.

While there have been a number of enhancements throughout the code, the primary focus of this release has been on making it easier for you to start using Fudge in your applications. With that focus has come a number of significant new features that you should be aware of:

• The Fudge Proto sub-project has been released for the first time. Taking our cue from Google Protocol Buffers, we have a .proto file format which can then generate out Java and C# language bindings for automatic conversion of objects to and from the Fudge encoding specification.
• We've made it substantially easier to build up an Object Encoding/Decoding Dictionary so that if you want to hand-write your mappings between Fudge messages and Objects, you can still access the auto-conversion functionality in the Fudge Proto project.
• We've built up a number of Automatic Object Conversion systems, so that even if you have nothing other than Java Beans/POJOs/PONOs, you can still automatically convert those to and from Fudge messages.
• We've developed Streaming Access APIs so that you can consume and write Fudge fields without having to work with an entire message as a bulk operation (we'll be using this for our automatic conversions to and from XML and JSON).
• A C Reference Implementation has been written. Already tested on a number of different Unix-like platforms and Windows, this will be the foundation of our eventual C++ version. As well, it can be used to support Fudge messaging in your favorite language which allows easy C bindings.

Our next release (0.3), will really be a release candidate release for 1.0. Our primary focus there is to work through any features that have been submitted by the community, and to finalize the one piece of the binary encoding that hasn't been completed (moving from Modified UTF-8 to true UTF-8, which won't affect you unless you want to encode Unicode null or certain high-bit multi-byte Unicode characters).

If you've thought having a self-describing, compact, binary encoding system ideally suited to distributed applications was interesting, but didn't know if we were ready for you to use in anger, don't wait. It's ready.