Welcome to Photon software

About Photon and VDSF, the Virtual Data Space Framework

VDSF was renamed Photon some weeks ago. Associated with this new name is a new web site. The current web site is not being updated and will be removed by January 2009.

Latest news: version 0.3.0 of Photon was lauched at the end of October 2008.

About VDSF, the Virtual Data Space Framework

VDSF is a development tool for complex server applications. It provides data containers shared amongst processes, in virtual memory. More explanations can be found in the first section of the Pros and Cons Document.

Current status

New: the roadmap of VDSF was modified. The upcoming beta release (this summer, I hope) will include:

• XML schemas that describes the content of the data containers and the content of the shared memoty itself.
• Modifications to the API to use XML as an option to create data containers.
• Code generator to produce C structs from the XML (C++ and Java classes will be done too, but probably not for the next release).
• Data containers for static/semi-static data will be introduced. The idea here is to have for example hash maps that do not require locking (read-only) - they can be updated but of course the mechanism to do it will be different than the one use for dynamic hash maps.
• The vdsf internal errorParser was replaced by the second alpha release (version 0.3.0) of the spinoff project, Error Parser. [This release was done at the end of May 2008 - it is stable enough to be used but is not considered a beta release because it cannot produce DocBook documentation, yet.]

Note: the introduction of metadata will not remove the existing functionality: for example, current queues can contain data records with variable content (of any length). With the introduction of structured content, this type of queue would be mapped to a queue with a single field of type "varBinary" with a minimal length of 1 and no maximal length.

The second alpha release was released in March 2008. The two major changes are a better isolation policy (between transactions belonging to different sessions) and validation and cleanup of the VDS (shared memory) by the watchdog (on startup).

The first alpha version was released at the end of November 2007. For this release, FIFO queues, hash maps and folders are supported. Other features include support for transactions and support for i18n (on linux). This release is available for linux on i386 (source code and RPM) and Windows 32 bits (source code and self-extracting installation package).

The menu on the left side contains a link to the development roadmap, including the expected features of the next few alpha releases and the current status of each feature expected for the next release.

Commercial support?

Plans to provide commercial support next fall are in the works. It is expected that there will be enough features at that time to enable the development of software using this framework (the current release is missing a few important features, for example ordered lists, support for the sparc 64 architecture, a Java API, etc.).

This web site...

was completely redesigned in Nov. 2007 with the help of Nornix TreeMenu. The new layout has been tested with Firefox 2, IE 6.0 and 7.0, Opera 9, Konqueror and Epiphany (the gnome browser). If you encounter a problem, with a browser, please let me know.

[Note: the web site looks better when javascript is enabled, but it works without problems without it.]

Last updated on October 29, 2008.