dataClay Claystone (4.x)

We will be naming our major releases, starting now. So welcome to the new version Claystone, which is dataClay 4.x.

4.0 (June 2024)

It has been a year of dataClay 3.x. This 4.0 version brings almost no breaking changes, but there are notorious architecture changes and new features.

Highlights

  • Internal refactor to leverage the asyncio library (along the asynchronous implementation of the gRPC library, i.e. gRPC AsyncIO API). These changes should be retrocompatible, but you can take advantage of the new asynchronous mechanisms by using the homonomous methods in the client API (e.g. a_make_persistent() instead of make_persistent()).

  • New experimental feature: AlienDataClayObject. See Alien Objects for a detailed explanation.

  • New microservice: the proxy. This can be used to circumvent NAT networks (e.g. Docker deployments) and also provides a more secure way to access the dataClay services. See Proxy service for more information.

Other changes

  • Basic support for JWT tokens in the proxy.

  • Starting the client automatically starts a new thread and an event loop within. This is used internally to handle the asynchronous calls and gRPC clients.

  • Updates in the orchestration scripts.

  • Added explicit get_attribute, set_attribute and del_attribute RPC calls on the backend. This is transparent for the applications (read, set and delete of attributes continue to work), but allows the introduction of fine-grain mechanisms on the proxy and also makes the debugging process clearer.

  • Offering a new Zenoh bridging mechanism (similar to the MQTT one).

  • Removed the session and password authentication. This feature will be handled by the proxy going forward.

  • Added healthcheck mechanisms (at the gRPC level) to monitor the status of the dataClay services.

4.1 (November 2024)

This minor release brings some bug fixes to the features introduced in 4.0, and also some new features.

Highlights

  • Official support for Python 3.13.

  • Improved granularity and semantic of raised exceptions. The list and description of all the current exceptions can be found in the Exceptions reference page.

  • Fixed behavior of the proxy. Now the code works properly in an async configuration.

  • More detailed examples and utility functions to support JWT tokens in the proxy side.

  • Better defaults for the logging system.

  • Improved and expanded documentation for Telemetry.

  • Build system is now using nox.

  • Support for PyCOMPSs constraints. Should work out of the box with dataClay 4.1 and the upcoming COMPSs version.