sharehound 1.2.3alpha is finally out

Well well, it's been a long while since the last release. Sharehound is not dead (yet ;), I've got a lot of ideas on quite necessary improvements for it, but unfortunately too little time lately.

This is mostly configuration enhancements release; also added ability to set encoding for individual FTP hosts and some more enhancements and bugfixes. It can be downloaded from here.

Changelog:
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Improvements

• hosts screen: files count is now updated right after host crawl is finished
• introduced 'encoding' config parameter for FTP crawl tasks
• hosts screen: new column, 'encoding'; added UpgradeTo123Task auto-launced migration task (visit app.properties file to set encoding for pre-1.2.3 hosts)
• allowed user queries to begin with wildcards ('*', '?' symbols)
• secured access to Ajaxified admin functions
• hosts screen: 'edit' function for 'encoding' column for FTP hosts (for 'admin' role users only). Uses configurable encodings list from WEB-INF/classes/encodings file. Copy it from expanded war file to config directory first if you want to change it. (see install.html for details on config dir)
• improved URL interface: bare search.do now works as searchEntry.do. searchEntry.do is left working for some time for backward compatibility.
• sharehound now requires web container supporting JSP 2.0. For Tomcat this means 5.5 and higher.
• sharehound is distributed as compressed war now to ease future upgrades; extracted some config files, incl. quartz-config.xml and custom user accounts, to external config directory. See install.html for details.
• lucene.properties' "index.directory" propery moved to new properties file, dir.properties; introduced some new dir properties there and made them all optional :)
  
• made sharehound's data dir specified by JVM parameter passed to web cotainer (e.g. Tomcat). See install.html for details.

Fixed bugs

• fatal startup error if index.directory (specified in lucene.properties) doesn't exist
• 'files' link from hosts list item doesn't work for some time when the host is indexed for a first time
• Admin screen: 'calculate hosts files counts' function's results are invisible for some time (until somebody call hostIndexer.flush)
• some non-ASCII FTP directories are not indexed (appears empty in index while they are not actually)
• sharehound can only run on Java 1.6 (was unintentionally compiled in 1.6 only mode)

(Blank) install instructions:
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Please refer to docs/install.html file inside the zip.

Upgrade instructions:
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Please refer to docs/release.txt file inside the zip.

blogger.com: ability to comment on a draft is lost

What a pity, I loved it! Was useful when preparing a sharehound build: first I make a draft, then put a 'make comment' link to it to the application properties file, then test it, then publish zip on Sourceforge, then make a post public. Now the 'test' phase is not working here :(. A workaround is to publish the post prior to testing then make it a draft again. I wonder if that temporary publish is reflected in RSS feed to this blog? Chances are that it is..

users feedback on sharehound 1.2.3alpha

Feel free to leave a comment on your experience with this release, sharehound in general or whatever :) Any language is OK. Feature requests are welcome.

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