Announcement: HiveBoard 0.3.0 first release out!

[Jean-Francois Poilpret <jf...@hcm.vnn.vn>]

Dear HiveMind users,

I am very glad to announce the release of HiveBoard 0.3.0, a shared online
whiteboard system based on HiveMind 1.1 and HiveMind Utilities 0.6.

It can be seen as a real-life application of HiveMind with HiveMind
Utilities.

The original announcement on SourceForge follows.

Cheers

	Jean-Francois

Announcement on SourceForge:
	HiveBoard 0.3.0 released!

After a long period of heavy work on the project, we are proud to announce
the third release of the "HiveBoard" application on SourceForge. 
 
In addition to many bugs fixes, the main improvements of release 0.3.0 are: 
- Full-screen capability with user-customized preferences for matting
various information (chat messages, notifications) on the screen 
- New "load past comments" feature to view previous comments occurred for a
White Board 
- New "take snapshot" feature to save the current image of a White Board to
the database for later retrieval 
- New "snapshots list" feature to show the list of all snapshots taken for a
White Board 
- New "Save" feature allowing to save the current content of a White Board
to a file. The feature supports several formats (JPEG and PNG, and more if
you have "Java Advanced Imaging Tools" installed) 
- Support of transparent colors 
- Improved performance and memory usage on both client and server 
- Users passwords are now encrypted in the database 
- Storage of user/password (encrypted) in preferences (e.g. Registry on
Windows) for faster login 
- Storage of window size and location in preferences 
 
Another important change -although not directly visible to the end users- is
the overhaul of the HiveBoard build system to the Open Source el4ant
(http://el4ant.sourceforge.net) build system. This has allowed painless
integration of important tools such as abbot (for automatic GUI tests),
checkstyle (for checking the good style of all source code) and emma (for
code coverage measurement during tests), overall contributing to a better
code and a higher quality application. 
 
The HiveBoard project aims to build a distributed shared whiteboard system,
particularly useful for meetings between remote teams (eg: in offshore
development). It is 100% built in Java, based on a client/server
architecture. Version 0.3.0 has the following highlights: 
- Server running on Jakarta Tomcat 5 or Jetty 5.1, and using PostgreSQL 8.0
or MySQL 4.1 
- Communication transport based on http (ensures usability through
firewalls) 
- Secure access to authorized persons only 
- Storage of whiteboards in DB (to allow meetings to be interrupted and
resumed later) 
- Rich graphical client application, easy to setup and use, running on Java
JRE 1.4 or later, allowing free docking of views inside the main window
(according to the user wishes) 
- Account administration available in the rich client application 
- Several graphical tools available: free-hand pen, eraser, oval, rectangle,
text. Color, line thickness, font type and size can be changed 
- Full-screen capability 
 
Technical highlights: 
- Server is Servlet 2.3 compliant and is based upon the following
techniques: 
- "Inversion of Control" (HiveMind container) 
- iBATIS SqlMaps for "low-level" database access 
- Caucho Hessian protocol for remote communications over http 
- HiveTranse for high-level transaction management and HiveMind-iBATIS
integration 
- HiveLock security framework for HiveMind 
- HiveRemoting for Hessian-HiveMind integration 
- HiveEvents for events notification 
- Client uses the following techniques/libraries: 
- Swing for all graphical aspects 
- HiveMind 
- HiveRemoting for remote access to the server 
- HiveEvents for events notification 
- HiveGUI for all GUI management (menus, docking, commands...) 
 
HiveBoard web site: http://hiveboard.sourceforge.net 
 
The HiveBoard team