Today I am pleased to announce the first alpha preview release (v0.5.4) of the Pion CEP Platform. Six months ago, Atomic Labs started out with a small (about 7,000 lines of code) networking library for Boost C++ users. Today, Pion consists of over 33,000 lines of C++ code, plus more than 5,500 lines of HTML, CSS, JavaScript & JSON for the user interface.

The Pion CEP Platform is open source software, published under the GNU Affero GPL license. The platform is a real-time event processing engine that is designed to be extremely extensible through the use plugins. Plugins can be developed to provide specialized data processing logic, web services, and to enable support for different data encoding formats and databases.

Today we are also launching a new development community website for Pion at http://www.pion.org/. There, you can browse or download the source code and documentation, or search and create new tickets. You can also find help and discuss Pion on our forums, or learn about our available email lists.

Pion has been tested to build and work properly on five different platforms including: Linux, Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. On our new website, we currently have pre-built binaries available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Additional binaries will be made available over the next several weeks.

Please note that this is an ALPHA release. It is intended for preview purposes only, and is missing important functionality that we plan to include in the final 1.0 release. This release has the following limitations:

1. Currently, only the Firefox web browser works properly with the UI. We plan to add support for additional browsers (namely IE and Safari) soon.
2. User authentication has not yet been implemented. You can create, edit and remove user accounts using the UI, but this data is not currently being saved or used in any way.
3. The "Vocabularies" section of the user interface is currently read-only. You can add, change and remove vocabularies by modifying the XML configuration files directly, although we recommend that you don't. =)
4. If you drag a reactor over top an existing reactor within the workspace, it sometimes becomes un-droppable. Drag around existing reactors instead.
5. You must hit after making any changes within the user interface configuration grids. If you hit the "save" button before hitting , your change will not be saved.
6. You must stop, and then start some Reactors for them to recognize certain configuration changes.
7. The following plugins are not functional: JSONCodec, XMLCodec and the TransformReactor.
8. The LogInputReactor is missing a significant amount of functionality that we plan to add in future releases.
9. The LogOutputReactor does not support log file rotation or compression.
10. The running states of Reactors (started/stopped) are not saved in the configuration files, and therefore are lost if the server is restarted.

For a complete list of known issues, please see our ticket-tracking system at:
http://www.pion.org/ticket-tracking

In the next few months, we will be working on these and other issues, as well as our suite of commercial Pion plugins. We are planning to publish several more (alpha and beta) builds leading up to our final 1.0 release this Summer.