Release date: 21 January, 2016
We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 4.5.0.
The Fedora 4.4.0 release furthers several major objectives:
This release is a major release (i.e. 4.4.0 instead of 4.3.1) because there are a two updates that are not strictly speaking backwards compatible with 4.3.0:
Although not a backwards incompatible update in the 4.4.0 release, it should be noted that the Import and Export services [6] have been deprecated due to their reliance on a JCR serialization versus an RDF-centric approach. These services will be supplanted by externalized machinery that transacts in RDF. |
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One of the technical priorities [9] of Fedora is to define a well-specified application programming interface (API) against which client applications can be written and future server-side implementations can be created. This Fedora API should be clear and detailed enough such that a corresponding technology compatibility kit [10] (TCK) would be able to indicate if any Fedora implementation fulfills or diverges from the specification. With this in mind, several issues were addressed in this release that clean up Fedora's RESTful interaction and tease out the non-core aspects of the Fedora ontology [11].
Fedora is a Linked Data Platform (LDP) server implementation. This release fixes a few bugs that relate to the interactions that an LDP client should expect.
A primary focus of the ongoing Fedora effort is to facilitate the upgrade/migration of Fedora3 repositories to Fedora4. To this end, a couple of improvements have been incorporated into the "migration-utils [12]" upgration utility, the most notable of which is enabling the utility to optionally be configured with authorization credentials.
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In support of Fedora's role in the preservation stack, this release includes two advances.
One of the exciting capabilities that Fedora enables is the creation of distributed, asynchronous, message-driven services that are external to the core repository but are triggered by repository events. This release includes an update to the Fedora-related Apache Camel-based [13] toolbox introducing the ability to configure the LDP 'Prefer' header that is used when requesting RDF to be indexed in an external triplestore.
Following the initial implementation of the Web Access Control [14] authorization module, this release furthers that effort with several fixes and improvements. Enhancements include:
WebACLs can now apply to binary resources
An HTTP header, 'On-Behalf-Of', can optionally be configured to offer delegated authorization (documentation [])
Additional documentation of Fedora's implementation of Web Access Controls is available on the wiki [].
Numerous refactorings, bugfixes, and clean-up tasks were addressed in this release:
[1] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Downloads [2] http://docs.fcrepo.org [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/ [4] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl [5] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA44/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Fixity [6] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA44/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Export+and+Import [7] http://www.duraspace.org/registry/fedora [8] http://www.duraspace.org/register-repository [9] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2015+-+2016+Technical+Priorities [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit [11] http://fedora.info/definitions/v4/2015/07/24/repository [12] https://github.com/fcrepo4-exts/migration-utils [13] http://camel.apache.org/ [14] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl |