Jon Knight , ROADS Software Developer: jon@net.lut.ac.uk, brings us up to date with what is happening with the various versions of the ROADS software http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/.
A v1.02 maintanence release of version 1 of ROADS has been created. This is simply v1.00 + all the patches to date and is mainly intended for new users to ROADS or for people that have problems applying patches - you don't need it if you've been applying patches already. It can be picked up from ftp://ftp.roads.lut.ac.uk/pub/ROADS/roads-v1.02.tar.Z.
The first public beta release of ROADS version 2 is also now available from ftp://ftp.roads.lut.ac.uk/pub/ROADS/beta/roads-v2b1.tar.Z. This distribution covers all of the mandatory requirements and some of the desirable ones that were gathered during the ROADS v2 requirements gathering process. Highlights includes support for centroid gathering and query routing using RFC 1913 mesh traversal, increased configurability of the generated HTML, multiple search views, fully docummented Perl code using POD, hooks to integrated Harvest Gatherers/Brokers and SOIF, offline editing with periodic database rebuilds and dynamically alterable numbers of variants and clusters during editing. There is also support for CSS1 style sheets in the HTML generated by the ROADS tools, and rudimentary support for extracting centroids from Z39.50 servers and gatewaying WHOIS++ queries to them. This means that both Harvest and WHOIS++ servers can participate in a WHOIS++ based distributed indexing and searching centroid mesh.
