[omniORB] New major omniORB / omniORBpy releases, version 4.2.0

[Duncan Grisby]

Hello,

It has been a long time coming, but I am please to announce the release
of a new major version of omniORB and omniORBpy, version 4.2.0.

These are stable releases. They are source code compatible with the
4.1.x series. C++ omniORB 4.2.0 is not binary-compatible with 4.1.x,
meaning that you must recompile your code against 4.2.0.

omniORB 4.2 has a number of new features compared to omniORB 4.1.x, both
large and small. Here are the highlights:

- Full Asynchronous Method Invocation (AMI) support.

- Support for ZIOP, which compresses large messages.

- Call timeouts are indicated with the CORBA::TIMEOUT exception,
rather than CORBA::TRANSIENT (unless suppressed with the
throwTransientOnTimeout configuration parameter).

- Servers can be limited to a range of ports to listen on.

- Performance improvements to Any, sequence buffer management,
unions, and other areas.

- In Python, IDL attributes can now be accessed as properties of
object references. i.e. IDL attribute 'example' can be accessed
as obj.example as well as with obj._get_example() and
obj._set_example().

- Ancient Python versions are no longer supported. omniidl and
omniORBpy now only work with Python 2.5 or later.

- omniidl works with Python 3.x as well as 2.x.


The releases can be downloaded in source and Windows binary forms from
SourceForge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/omniorb/files/omniORB/omniORB-4.2.0/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/omniorb/files/omniORBpy/omniORBpy-4.2.0/

If people need other Windows binary variants, let me know and I'll see
if I can arrange them.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to these releases in one way or
another.

Enjoy!

Duncan.