Sunrise 0.40 pre1 released

[Alexander Turcic]

Laurens decided to bring out a prerelease of Sunrise V0.40 (the Enhanced Conduit feature is still missing and will be added in the "final" V0.40 due shortly).

Sunrise V0.40 comes with a lot of new enhancements, so make sure you give it a try if you haven't seen Sunrise in action before:
- new spidering engine
- update panel
- SunriseCL command line tool
- support for conditional updates (Laurens: do you also support 304 conditional gets, i.e. Last-Modified/Etag header tags?)
- reduced memory usage
- exact autoupdate
- faster startup
- HttpClient 3.0

[Laurens]

Originally Posted by Alexander

- support for conditional updates (Laurens: do you also support 304 conditional gets, i.e. Last-Modified/Etag header tags?)

Yes, conditional GET requests using If-Modified-Since and/or If-None-Match headers are supported.

[Alexander Turcic]

Cool!

[Gnam]

Originally Posted by Laurens

Yes, conditional GET requests using If-Modified-Since and/or If-None-Match headers are supported.

Yes, cool!

But what does it mean?


Bye,
Gnam

[Alexander Turcic]

It means he is one of the few offline browser parsers that try to save other people's bucks by not downloading the same page content twice

Here is the relevant excerpt from the official W3 documentation:

10.3.5 304 Not Modified

If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the document has not been modified, the server SHOULD respond with this status code. The 304 response MUST NOT contain a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

The response MUST include the following header fields:

- Date, unless its omission is required by section 14.18.1

If a clockless origin server obeys these rules, and proxies and clients add their own Date to any response received without one (as already specified by [RFC 2068], section 14.19), caches will operate correctly.

- ETag and/or Content-Location, if the header would have been sent
in a 200 response to the same request

- Expires, Cache-Control, and/or Vary, if the field-value might
differ from that sent in any previous response for the same
variant

If the conditional GET used a strong cache validator (see section 13.3.3), the response SHOULD NOT include other entity-headers. Otherwise (i.e., the conditional GET used a weak validator), the response MUST NOT include other entity-headers; this prevents inconsistencies between cached entity-bodies and updated headers.

If a 304 response indicates an entity not currently cached, then the cache MUST disregard the response and repeat the request without the conditional.

If a cache uses a received 304 response to update a cache entry, the cache MUST update the entry to reflect any new field values given in the response.

As you can see, not really relevant for users, but nice for website hosters like me to know that Sunrise supports it

[Gnam]

Originally Posted by Alexander

It means he is one of the few offline browser parsers that try to save other people's bucks by not downloading the same page content twice

As you can see, not really relevant for users, but nice for website hosters like me to know that Sunrise supports it

I see, thanks for that Alexander.
I don't know much about programming apart from tweaking pre-made javascripts but I can see that Laurens is a thoughtful programmer.

Sunrise just exudes quality and Laurens comes across as very professional!


Bye,
Gnam!

[Laurens]

Originally Posted by Alexander

As you can see, not really relevant for users, but nice for website hosters like me to know that Sunrise supports it

Well, actually, the download cache also makes updates run (significantly) faster for the user. Both the user and the host benefit from the reduction in network traffic.

[mercedes]

Woohoo!, something to play with. Thanks Laurens.

[strat]

Hi Laurens,

The new version looks great. The only problem is that it starts retrieving sites but after about 5 seconds Sunrise closes down. It's similar to the crash problem I had on my home computer, but I was not having the same difficulty here at work. In fact I just used the old version of Sunrise at work yesterday with no issues. My work computer runs Win98SE btw.

Dave
PS. I'm not positive about this but I MAY not have updates to the most recent 3 version here at work, only at home. So my trouble at home may have begun when I used the last version before this current v4.0.

[Laurens]

Originally Posted by strat

The new version looks great. The only problem is that it starts retrieving sites but after about 5 seconds Sunrise closes down. It's similar to the crash problem I had on my home computer, but I was not having the same difficulty here at work. In fact I just used the old version of Sunrise at work yesterday with no issues. My work computer runs Win98SE btw.

Try opening Preferences. If Sunrise also crashes there, the download cache is somehow not getting initialized properly(which, in turn, explains why it's crashing when it's trying to update a site). Let me know.

[strat]

I'll give that a try Laurens. I'll have to rename my document list so that Sunrise does not load it on start up, otherwise it will crash before I can go into preferences. Will this make a difference to the test you are suggesting?

Dave

[strat]

Okay, gave it a try. If I rename my Sunrise list I can get Sunrise to load and to stay in place. I can open the preferences no problem and I can create a new docuuments list. However I went to add the CBC mobile site and when it got to the retrieving stage, Sunrise crashed.

Let me know if you want me to try something else.

[Laurens]

I will add better error reporting facilities in the next prerelease. This way you (or any other user) can send me more detailed information in case of a crash.

The only thing I can think of right now is to clear the Sunrise preferences from the Registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JavaSoft\Prefs\sunrise

Simply delete the entire "sunrise" key, it will be recreated and repopulated the next time you run Sunrise.

[strat]

Hi Laurens,

I deleted the key and I'm still having the same problems. Not sure what it can be at this point.

Dave

[Laurens]

The Sunrise v0.40 prerelease currently does not work on Windows 98. This is due to a crash in one of the standard Java libraries. I will have to find a workaround.