************************************************************* C O N C E P T B A S E RELEASE NOTES for Version 3.3 ConceptBase Team RWTH Aachen, Informatik V Prof.Dr. Matthias Jarke Ahornstr. 55 52056 Aachen, Germany Tel.: ++49+241 80 21 501 Fax ++49+241 8888 321 email: CB@picasso.informatik.rwth-aachen.de http://www.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/I5/CBdoc/cbflyer.html ************************************************************* ConceptBase 3.3 is an improved version of ConceptBase 3.2. We decided to distribute this release mainly for the following reasons: 1) CB 3.3 is based on a new version 4.0.2 of ProLog by BIM which allows us to generate runtime systems that run in an unlimited way on any SUN machine without needing machine specific runtime licenses. For us and all people interested in CB this brings the advantage of a less bureaucratic licensing procedure. Of course, the copyright stays with the ConceptBase team. 2) Due to the growing number of people who ask for a Solaris version of ConceptBase we provide two versions: CB 3.2.4 running under SunOS 4.1.3, and CB 3.3 for SunOS 5.3 (Solaris 2.3). Both are functionally equivalent. 3) Last but not least we have fixed several minor bugs. Please note that we will not provide future releases for SunOS 4.1.3. We recommend any user to switch to CB 3.3 as soon as possible! *************************************************************** SMALL CHANGES: -------------- 1. We have integrated a new parser for Telos frames based on a lex/yacc style grammar which is now used by both server and usage environment. Side effect of this activity is a slightly restricted termination condition for each Telos frame. Until now it was optional to specify the object name at the end of a frame. Since in practice this resulted sometimes in ambiguities the object name at the end of the frame is now obligatory. Example: Class Employee isA Person with attribute dept:Department; .... .... end must now be specified as Class Employee isA Person with attribute dept:Department; .... .... end Employee REMARK: One can get out of this restriction by using the following parser directives before a frame {$set syntax=PlainAachen} --> Frame ending WITHOUT object name {$set syntax=PlainToronto} --> Frame ending WITH object name We recommend to apply this facility only in cases of old applications which still reside in frame format in files in order to avoid too expensive changings. We don't promise that this switch is still available in future releases. 2. Applications generated with CB 3.2 can be used with CB 3.3 without recompiling from frame format. However, the application's old component OB.builtin should be replaced by $CB_HOME/CB_Exe/KSV_Exe/OB.builtin. Application specific builtin queries have to be appended to this new OB.builtin by hand. In addition running old applications with CB 3.3 may cause warnings of the form "*** WARNING 115 *** Possible erroneous use of atom nil instead of []." which should be ignored. 3. The structural optimization which was in the former releases only applied to integrity constraints is now also used for the compilation of deductive rules. This modification ensures an improved performance of ConceptBase's query evaluator. 4. The CoAuthor environment is no longer shipped with ConceptBase. 5. We are at the moment not able to support all libraries on Solaris2.3 to application programmers. This version contains only the libCB.a, which is used for communication with the ConceptBaseServer. An example for use of this library is included in $CB_HOME/CB_Exe/XI_Exe/sun4/testapp. During runtime of own applications it is important to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH (...:/usr/ucblib) for use of the libucb. Please look at the Makefile in testapp.