Release date: 21 January, 2016
We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 4.5.0.
The Fedora 4.5.0 release furthers several major objectives:
This release is a major release (i.e. 4.5.0 instead of 4.4.1) because there are a several REST API updates that are not backwards compatible with 4.4.0. The theme of these updates is the removal of JCR-related properties that have heretofore been leaked from the Fedora API in the RDF returned to users. Fedora 4 is in no way dependent on JCR, and any mention of JCR found in RESTful responses will be removed. No client code should require updating for this release unless it contains dependencies on JCR-namespaced properties. See tickets in "Application Programming Interface" below for more details. |
One of the technical priorities [5] 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 [6] (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.
Fedora is a Linked Data Platform (LDP) server implementation. This release resolves a bug that relates 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 [7]" 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 [10] 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 [11] 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 [12])
Additional documentation of Fedora's implementation of Web Access Controls is available on the wiki [15].
From the perspectives of code maintainability, intelligibility, replaceability, and clearly defined separation of responsibility, significant focus continues towards increasing the modularity of Fedora. In this release, this effort can be seen in the extraction of the 'transform' and 'id minting' modules into their own projects, and the decoupling of project dependencies.
This release includes several useful updates to the HTML user interface:
Housekeeping and Bugfixes
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/FF/2015+-+2016+Technical+Priorities [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit [7] https://github.com/fcrepo4-exts/migration-utils [8] https://github.com/fcrepo4-exts/fcrepo4-vagrant [9] https://github.com/dain/leveldb [10] http://camel.apache.org/ [11] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl [12] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/Principal+Providers#PrincipalProviders-DelegateHeaderPrincipalProvider [13] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/Default+Filesystem-based+Policy [14] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/How+to+Use+WebAC+agentClass+Groups [15] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/WebAC+Authorization+Delegate |