[alicebot-archcomm] 4.1.3 Release

[Noel Bush]

Program D 4.1.3 is now available at
http://alicebot.org/downloads/foundation.php.  This release is primarily
meant as a "cleanup" release, although there have been some significant
improvements in functionality and performance as well as a general code
cleanup (see below).

You are encouraged to give it a spin; but be aware that there are some
significant loose ends with respect to documentation and configuration.
Most notably: (a) the console output is a lot cleaner, but perhaps also
too informative for general users (you can turn off most of the
informative messages from server.properties); and (b) the startup.xml
file looks significantly different, and [nota bene!] is bound to change
again soon.  Very little is still available in the way of documentation,
although server.properties and startup.xml are documented inline.

Also note that the Targeting GUI is a subset of what's in Program dB,
and does seem to have some quirks in its regrettably convoluted caching
scheme (blame me).  However, it allows you to monitor a remote targets
file from a local instance of the GUI, and create new categories as
targets come in.

If you find bugs with this version, please address them to the
alicebot-bugs-programd mailing list.  If you have complaints or
suggestions for improvement, then alicebot-general or alicebot-developer
are appropriate venues.  (Sign up for mailing lists at
http://list.alicebot.org.)

You may expect to see a 4.1.4 release soon, probably with quite a bit
less of a wait than it took for 4.1.3 to appear.  Since a lot of design
issues have been cleared up, it's now a lot easier to make enhancements
to the code.  The next release may see some differences in how user
authentication works, support for multiple bots, and fixes for bug
reports which are bound to come pouring in ;-).

Most of the work on this release was done by me, building on top of the
tremendous job done by Tom Ringate and Pedro Colla.  The user
authentication implementation was sponsored by Artificial Solutions AB.

Here are the major improvements to functionality:
* User authentication for HTTP introduced
* Re-integration of targeting and minimal targeting tool (from Program
dB)
* Ability to use Program D *without* a database (default configuration
uses a flat file scheme)
* much closer to AIML 1.0.x compliance, and additions to test cases to
verify same
* Ability to specify substitutions (including those for person, person2
  and gender) externally (in startup.xml)
* XML logging of chat conversations
* Ability to use different templates for Responders
* better handling of character encodings for AIML files, HTML templates
and http servlet
* Proper support of patterns in condition/li value attributes
* Big speed improvement for AIML loading, and for matching
* Logging format regularized (and used more than before)
* Much more configurable (see server properties)
* Ability to prohibit use of <system> and/or <javascript> tags
* Ability to deny support of deprecated AIML 0.9 tags
* Potential to use http server of choice

Here are the major improvements to code:
* Source code cleanup (all but a few files)
  * formatting standardized, grammar fixed
  * imports made explicit and cryptic variables renamed
  * complete javadoc on nearly all classes & variables
* some design improvements (more use of interfaces, less duplicated
code)
* less fixed dependence on non-GPL code (Jetty is removed to a jar file,
no
longer mixed in with org.alicebot code)
* some improvements to AIMLReader -- still not a "real" XML parser, but
  it's faster than anything else -- now there's less duplicated code
* similar comment for AIMLParser -- it also has "pluggable" processors

Just about all major changes to source code are documented in each file.