ANNOUNCE: TOMI_4_Ada 0.10 Initial Release

ANNOUNCE: TOMI_4_Ada 0.10 Initial Release

[Marc A. Criley]

TOMI_4_Ada is "Text-Oriented Messaging Interfaces 'for' Ada", providing 
a basic Ada interface to existing messaging middleware providers, and a
framework for expanding support to currently unsupported ones. While 
most messaging middleware supports binary as well as text messaging 
(text being simply a subset of binary), TOMI_4_Ada focuses exclusively 
on textual transfers so as to simplify the interface, but remaining 
well-equipped to support the broad domain of text-based messaging 
protocols, i.e. XML, HTML, JSON, raw text, etc.

Out of the box TOMI_4_Ada provides interfaces to the text messaging 
capabilities of three protocols:

  - STOMP protocol via the Apache ActiveMQ broker
  - AMQP via the OpenAMQ broker
  - ZeroMQ (brokerless)

TOMI_4_Ada provides the following capabilities:

* A "thick" binding to a subset of each of the supported messaging
   protocols that includes a callback-based publish/subscribe and
   client/server reference implementation.

* A "thin" binding to a subset of the WireAPI protocol that is supplied
   as part of the OpenAMQ message broker distribution.

* The STOMP protocol is simply a definition of a text-based protocol,
   and the TOMI_4_Ada.STOMP_Adapter package implements it.  An externally
   supplied transport protocol (such as TOMI_4_Ada.Transport.TCP_Connect)
   and supporting messaging broker, such as Apache ActiveMQ, is then
   required to convey messages utilizing the STOMP protocol.

In addition a number of simple test programs are provided in the 'test'
directory that exercise various aspects of the thick bindings. These can 
be used as a starting point for implementing one's own 
application-specific messaging.

TOMI_4_Ada was developed on Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) using the GNAT GPL 2010 
compiler and verified in that environment with the Apache ActiveMQ 
broker, the OpenAMQ broker, and Per Sandberg's ZeroMQ binding.

TOMI_4_Ada 0.10 is considered an alpha release, but currently has no 
known outstanding bugs. It is available on SourceForge at 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tomi4ada/files.

Marc A. Criley
McKae Technologies