December 4, 2006 - Spread 4.0 is now available for download from www.spread.org.

Spread 4 is a major new version of the Spread project. This release includes several highly requested new features that:

• Improve manageability by allowing dynamic configuration of sets of daemons without requiring a restart;
• Improve performance;
• Ease the development of Spread based applications with better membership reporting;
• Support multi-threaded forking client applications;
• Integrate a Virtual Synchrony interface;
• Provide simpler membership APIs;
• Organize and improve the software build for both Windows and Unix systems.

It also includes the usual collection of bug fixes. A list of major bug fixes and details of the new capabilities can be found in www.spread.org.

The Spread 4.0 release does have some specific API changes, so some (not all) applications may need small source code changes in order to continue to work. Extensive documentation is available in the docs directory in the distributions and in the Spread 4 API.

The Spread 4.0 release provides a solid platform for Spread applications. However, because of the API changes it is not a drop in replacement for current applications. We highly encourage anyone working on new applications to use this release. Those currently running Spread applications should determine the best time for a switch to Spread 4.

For those who are continuing to use Spread 3.17, an updated version, Spread 3.17.4, has also been released. Spread 3.17.4 includes several bug fixes. It and has no external api changes and does not include major new features.