We are please to announce release 1.6 of BrightstarDB is now available. As usual you can get the packages via NuGet or download the installer from our Codeplex project page.
There are a bunch of new things added in this release covering a number of different areas.
For mobile developers we have added support for Android via Xamarin.Android. This gives you the ability to run a BrightstarDB triple store on an Android device and use the BrightstarDB entity framework in your Xamarin.Andorid application. This is an initial experimental release to get some feedback so that we can work on improving both the developer and the user experience when using BrightstarDB on mobile devices. There are a few caveats that you should be aware of (these are called out in the documentation).
The basic message is that the Android support is there to be experimented with, but should not yet be considered production-ready. However we are releasing it now in its current state in the hope of getting some early feedback to help us get it quickly to the point where it can be used in production.
iOS support is on the roadmap for 1.7.
When using LINQ to query the BrightstarDB Entity Framework and return a collection of entities as the results, there are two possible paths to go down. The first is to generate a SPARQL query that returns only the IDs of the entities and then to “lazily load” the entities as the client code requests them. This results in N+1 queries to retrieve N entities (one query to find the IDs and then one for each entity to be lazily loaded). The alternative is to generate a SPARQL query that constructs an RDF graph from which the client can then load all of the entities in a single go (so-called “eager loading”). This reduces the query to a single query (albeit one that will generate a much larger results set). Up to now, BrightstarDB has only been able to perform eager loading for queries that return unsorted, unpaged lists of entities. With this update we now support returning sorted, paged lists of entities with eager loading.
This puts much more control into the hands of the client application, as more of the LINQ queries that are written to look like they are eager loading entities are actually now doing that. If you want to stick with the old “lazily loaded” approach, you can write your LINQ query to return the ID of the entities you are interested in, and then use a second LINQ query to retrieve the entity with that ID.
On the subject of the Entity Framework we have also revamped the way connection strings are written to connect the BrightstarDB Entity Framework to third-party triple stores. This work enables you to treat a server tha supports multiple stores in much the same way as you would a BrightstarDB server. You can also create a DotNetRDF configuration graph that contains multiple stores. Connections to generic SPARQL endpoints are also much easier to specify now and it is possible to create a read-only connection to a SPARQL query endpoint.
The BrightstarDB server can now be configured to authenticate users using an ASP.NET Membership provider and to assign permissions based on the user identity and/or their roles. If you combine this with the BrightstarDB Membership Provider we blogged about a while ago you can actually use BrightstarDB to manage the user accounts too.
The Export Job now supports a parameter to specify the export format. This maybe isn’t such a big step forward right now (we have moved from supporting only NQuads to being able to support NQuads or NTriples…), but we will add other export formats in coming releases (RDF/XML is the first target as well as support for gzip’d output).
We have tidied up the packaging of BrightstarDB on NuGet – it now no longer bundles in dependency assemblies but instead specifies dependencies on other NuGet packages. This makes our package much smaller and makes it play more nicely in large projects where you may have multiple other NuGet package dependencies. We also changed the relationship between the BrightstarDB and the BrightstarDBLibs packages. Previously these two packages both independently included a version of the core BrightstarDB assembly, the only difference between the two being that the BrightstarDB package also included the Text Template file for the Entity Framework and the BrightstarDBLibs package did not. We have now change this so that the BrightstarDB package only includes the Text Template file and has a dependency on the BrightstarDBLibs package. In practice this should not make much difference to your projects using BrightstarDB via NuGet, except that you will now see our dependency libraries being included in their own NuGet packages rather than being bundled into ours.
You can download the full installer package from our Codeplex project page; update or install via NuGet and read the latest docs at ReadTheDocs.org.