The latest and greatest Pion alpha release, version 0.5.6, is now available on our website at http://www.pion.org.

The new Pion CEP Platform user interface now supports authentication. User accounts can be added, changed and deleted from the user management page. Vocabulary metadata can now also be modified. In addition, we have added support for Internet Explorer.

We have also made several performance enhancements in Pion's core event processing engine. Our initial benchmarks indicate Pion can easily process millions of events per second for each available CPU core -- as many as 25 million (single field) events per second with one 2.4 Ghz quad-core CPU.

We've added support in the network library for authentication using either session cookies or HTTP Basic-Auth. The HTTPServer class now includes support for handling redirects (or URL rewrites). The PionScheduler class has been made more extensible and provides support for two different scheduling methods.

Binary distribution files are now also available. Since the previous release, we have added binary packages for Redhat 5, and have made the MacOS X application a universal binary.

The new release includes many additional bug fixes and enhancements. For a complete list, please see the respective change log files.