Status

The bulk of Kamaelia is a collection of components that use Axon. These range from components for building network servers and clients using TCP and Multicast, through to music playback, audio codec decode through to components suitable for viewing network topologies and interactive systems - such as networked personal autocues.

Axon - Kamaelia core concurrency framework

The current status of the project is that Axon itself has been deemed feature stable, and currently stands at version 1.5.1. Axon runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Series 60 mobile phones. This is sufficiently stable in terms of API and coverage in terms of testcases to be used as is. It should work with python 2.2 onwards. If it doesn't, please let us know!

Examples included with Axon's release:

• A simple producer/consumer example - this shows how to build components, and build pipelines manually. (Syntactic sugar for pipelines exists inside Kamaelia's Util tree)
• A more complex, but still simple producer/consumer example.

Kamaelia

The Kamaelia portion is the larger of the two parts to the project since it is a collection of components that use Axon. These range from components for building network servers and clients through to music playback, audio codec decode through to components suitable for viewing network topologies and interactive systems.

We feel we're about half way towards reaching a 1.0 release. As a result the current version number reflects this and currently stands at 0.5.0. That said, like Axon, it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Series 60 mobile phones. Though it is considered an alpha release, don't be put off. It is already very functional and generally very stable.

Examples included with Kamaelia's 0.1.2 release:

• Example 1: A simple "FortuneCookie" protocol system. Includes server and client as part of a single system.
• Example 2: This has much the same structure, but rather than serve and display fortune cookies, serves (ogg vorbis) audio over a TCP connection to a client which decodes and plays back the audio.
• Example 3: Splits the structure in example 2 into a specific server application and a client application. On a single CPU system with Axon versions 1.1.0 or lower, this causes problems because Axon doesn't hint to the system it's busy waiting and interruptable. Above that Axon does. (Hence why the latest version of Axon is generally recommended)
• Example 4: Simple multicast based ogg vorbis streaming system.

• Example 5: An introspecting version of Examples 2/3. This creates a simple streaming system, and looks inside to see what components are running/active, and passes the resulting information over a network connection to an Axon Visualisation server.
• Example 6: This is a simple/generic topology visualisation server. The server listens on port 1500, and accepts the following commands:
  ADD NODE id label auto -
  ADD LINK id id
  DEL NODE id
  DEL ALL
As this stands this is pretty useful, but that's pretty much everything it does like this.
• Example 7: This shows how the visualisation subsystem can be extended to work in different ways. What this does by default when run is randomly create new nodes and new linkages quite quickly, allowing you to see how the system works.
• Example 8: Sample slideshow/presentation tool. Unlike traditional slideshow/presentation tools, you can modify this to run arbitrary components. An example of how this can work is provided - allowing stepping through some graph visualisations along with the presentation.
• Example 9: Simple component based game using pygame. Not quite fully integrated with the other pygame code (will be), but fully reusable & reconfigurable code and it's a useful start for people wanting to see how to write things varying from games through other interactive systems.

Other Kamaelia Modules & comments:

We have recently made our code available as a CVS release for developers who are interested at this stage. We are slowly moving documentation and material describing the motivation into both the website and documentation. The project changed to a largely test-first approach late in the project, and some test suites are being implemented. The Kamaelia system itself is now largely complete for building TCP based servers - the most common class of network server. A small number of trivial example protocols are included.