Blog Posts

Version 3.7.1.1 addresses two major issues: 1.) A failure to authenticate with Windows File Shares and 2.) Components incorrectly grouping by key fields.  You will find more details about the release in the Twister Data Integrator 3.7.1.1 Release Notes.

The Twister team has released a minor patch to the 3.7.0 feature branch.  The patch addresses issues related to installing Twister Designer into Windows environments that utilize network home directories.  The patch also adjusts the Controller's temporary directory to prevent other processes from deleting necessary temp files. You can find the changelog in the tracker.

The development team is putting the 3.7 release through final testing to target a 10/31 release.  I want to thank our beta customers that have contributed feedback and our test team for executing thousands of test cases. Stay tuned for the official announcement on Monday.  In the meantime, you can check out the release notes at Twister Data Integrator 3.7.0.0 Beta Build 263 Release Notes.

You may have noticed that the support site was down last week. In an effort to improve the responsiveness of the forums, we transitioned from one ISP to another. I apologize for the extended outage, it didn't go as smoothly as planned. On the bright side, I have noticed an improvement in the speed, and I hope you do too.  

For those of you who were not present at last night's Twister User Group, we've established our own FusionForge server at http://support.sms-fed.com/forge/ to make it easier to coordinate and maintain the non-core components and research projects around Twister.  It allows us to establish individual projects, each with their own set of developers, their own subversion repository, their own issue tracker, forums, documentation and releases. This will ultimately replace the "Sandbox" area of the support site. Several projects have already been established around Marklogic, Endeca, Sharepoint, Exist, Redis, Cluto and more.  If you are interested in contributing or have your own idea for a project, sign up for an account.

I often take for granted that the software team meets a couple of times a week to discuss upcoming tasks and priorities.  The rest of the team, those on the business development, integration efforts and our customers, haven't been as involved as we, or they, would like.  So we looked at ways that we can improve that.   A few months ago, we started a monthly User Group meeting and it has proven to be a good communication tool.  We started presenting the list of features coming in the upcoming releases and took informal polls for what should get priority for later releases.  Unfortunately its just not realistic that all of our users can attend every meeting, so we wanted some way to capture those polls and present the roadmap for everyone to see whenever they want it.

Today we are introducing Tracker (http://support.sms-fed.com/tracker/), a publicly accessable issue and task tracker, to allow our team members in business development, integration and our customers to contribute to the roadmap planning process.  Using this tool, everyone can view the current roadmap to see the scope of each release, including new features and bug fixes.  Everyone can watch the progress of each issue and subscribe to changes via email or RSS. Users with accounts can influence the planning process by taking advantage of the "Vote for it" option on each issue.  The votes will allow us to prioritize the issues during the monthly sprint planning meeting.  So check it out and vote for what's most important to you.  Let us know what you think and how we can improve the process.

The first beta is now available for the upcoming 3.6.2 release.  Please read the  Twister Designer 3.6.2 Beta 1 Release Notes and then download the software. 

I know you missed the weekly blog post last week, I was out enjoying a vacation with the family. I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving dinner and are getting into the spirit of the upcoming holidays.  A few things happened while I was out.  The team put together the 3.6.2.0 Milestone 2 build and generated all of the test cases.  The JMS publisher, JMS subscriber and REST client components, which will be included in 3.6.2.0, were backported and published to the sandbox to solicit feedback and provide early access to that functionality.  A 3.6.1.2 patch was put together to resolve some relatively minor issues and will be published to the support site this week.  We've also done some work on one of the more requested enhancements of enabling and disabling components at design time in the Designer. 

Not everything was positive. An issue was identified in the Database Query component regarding null BLOB values returned from Oracle.  Another issue was reported against the XML Validator not properly handling schema includes.  The fixes for both of these issues will be included in an upcoming 3.6.1.3 patch.