Friday 13th (2016/05)

A whole bunch of changes, just in time for Friday the 13th. :-)

Fixes

  • The new from clipboard menu item in the Flow editor now no longer requires an editable flow.

  • adams-rats: the Rat standalone and derived actors now handle stopping of flow better, no more NullPointerException when calling stopIfNecessary.

  • adams-spreadsheet: SpreadSheetFileReader's getItemClass() method now checks whether the reader returns a spreadsheet class or not to avoid NullPointerException.

  • SetVariable transformer no longer uses content passing through as value if variable attached to variableValue has an empty value.

  • Upgraded some libraries and barred other, duplicate ones from being added to the build process to avoid duplicate jars. This was triggered by ADAMS no longer starting at one of our customers due to java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError exceptions.

Changes

  • The Breakpoint control actor now sports copy to clipboard and paste as new flow buttons on the Source tab.

  • It is now possible to have platform-specific properties files. The default one with extension .props is always read first and an existing platform-specific one can override its values. Extensions for the platforms are as follows:

    • Linux: .linux

    • Android: .android

    • Mac: .mac

    • Windows: .windows

  • The Flow editor now has Mac-specific shortcuts (feedback welcome, whether these make sense or need adapting). Other standard keystrokes in the GUI get replaced with Mac-specific ones as well. The actor tree popup has improved search and display: empty search displays all actors again, search starts with first character, clicking on filter/strict checkboxes expands the tree fully.

  • The Edit external flow menu item in the flow editor's tree popup menu now opens flow in new tab rather than dialog.

  • Upgraded the jfilechooser-bookmarks dependency, with the filechoosers now sporting a copy and a paste button for the current directory.

  • Switched to [jclipboardhelper library](https://github.com/fracpete/jclipboardhelper) for clipboard-related operations.

  • The CombineVariables source now shortens its quickinfo display to 40 characters to avoid overly long displays.

  • adams-spreadsheet: The SpreadSheetDbWriter sink now supports batch import, which can speed up data import dramatically.

  • Boolean conditions in the flow now use the actor's logger to allow locating of offending conditions.

  • adams-visualstats: refactored the module to be SpreadSheet-based and removed the adams-weka dependency.

  • adams-video: the TrailDisplay sink now allows you to save the trail in the simple trail format (Save text as...).

  • adams-weka: the WekaInstancesToSpreadSheet conversion now creates a lightweight view if the InstancesView spreadsheet type is selected. Of course, the view doesn't support all the features of a spreadsheet object, but avoids costly conversion if only ever read operations are performed. Adding and removing rows is possible, but not changing column names, inserting/deleting columns.

  • Internally, the filter class hierarchy got refactored and now uses the new adams.data.filter.Filter interface instead of the abstract superclass adams.data.filter.AbstractFilter. This was necessary in order to introduce the new adams.data.filter.BatchFilter interface. This new interface is for filters that can operate on a number of data containers at a time. The interface does not require to return the same number of data containers after the filtering. Currently, only the PassThrough implements this new interface (as educational example).

  • Using now Groovy 2.4.5 in order to align with Weka's kfGroovy package.

Additions

  • adams-rats: the RatPlague rat simply duplicates itself to enable parallel execution of the same code, but working off different queues (e.g., load balanced queues)

  • adams-core

    • The ForwardingScriptingEngine for the remote command framework forwards commands obtained via a base scripting engine and forwards them to a defined forwarding connection. This can be used for performing load-balancing.

    • DefaultMasterScriptingEngine and DefaultSlaveScriptingEngine allow for distributed computation. The slave engines simply register with the master and then wait for jobs to execute. The master performs load-balancing on the registered slaves. This allows sending of sub-flows (incl storage items and variables) to be executed on remote machines.

    • The ManualFeedScriptingEngine is for internal use only, as it requires the remote commands to be added programmatically.

    • The ExecuteRemoteCommand executes the remote command coming through, making use of the ManualFeedScriptingEngine.

    • ContainerToVariables and ContainerToStorage allow easy transferral of container values into variables/internal storage that match the regular expression.

  • adams-maps: added a spreadsheet reader for Arc/Info ASCII Grid (or Esri Grid) files.

  • adams-weka: added GaussianProcessesNoWeights classifier, which is just a copy of GP before it could natively handle instance weights (merely uses resampling).

  • adams-ml: simple actual vs predicted plots can be generated with the (aptly named) ActualVsPredictedPlot sink, which uses a spreadsheet as input.

  • adams-imaging: added handlers for displaying image metadata in the preview browser.

  • started incubating the adams-jclouds and adams-openstack modules for cloud integration.