Mistral

Mistral 0.9.5 has been released. For further information please check the change log.

This article describes Mistral, an opensource, high level imaging engine aimed at professional imaging applications which:allows to use under an unified API a number of existing imaging engines (such as Java2D, JAI and others);implements ... [More] platform-specific optimizations;can be easily extended;includes an advanced image renderer;has extensive support for distributed processing;supports metadata extraction (in progress).Feedback to this article can be posted to the Mistral forum. [Less]

Mistral 0.9.4 has been released. The change log is available here.

Mistral is still very young (spinned off another project last summer) and needs work for completing the API, testing and documenting it. Nevertheless, in the last month it get involved in two small paid projects of mine:as the back end for a webapp ... [More] used to manage a library of photosin form of a small applet to perform a few operations on faxes(BTW, both the projects will be opensourced and I will talk more about them later). As it happens in such circumstances, I've been working on Mistral with specific focus on the issues related to the two projects (of course there's also the other main workflow, which is supporting the Pleiades project in distributed environments, where I'm working with Emmanuele).Yesterday I got the first two email messages from people interested in it. The former was from a guy that told me "Mistral has failed the five minutes test". That is, he failed in downloading, compiling and trying some demo in a very short time. He was right, unfortunately. But it was simple to fix it, and most of the needed changes are already in the repository. The latter told me that he is evaluating Mistral, he's using it, but misses some simple features to go on: basically, he needs to strip the "transparency" channel from some PNG images before resizing and writing them in JPEG format (that doesn't support transparency). Fortunately, the flexible and simple design of Mistral allows to easily solve this kind of problems without the need of patches. [Less]

The Mistral project is growing and now there's enough stuff to start blogging about it. So I added a new category in the TidalBlog; furthermore all Mistral-related stuff will be replicated in the new Mistral Blog.

Mistral 0.9.3 has been released. Starting from this version, the Sun Grid and Rio plugins are released in separate packages. Al the details are in the "Download" section.

Today the Mistral plugin for the Sun Grid has been successfully run for the first time on the Sun Grid (using the Pleiades project as a testcase).   The computing code is precisely the same that also run on a local PC or on a home-made cluster built ... [More] with Jini and Rio. Now we can really say that Mistral really delivers WORA in highly scalable scenarios! [Less]

Mistral 0.9.2.256 has been released.

The first official release (0.9.106) has been published. Also some WebStart examples (they can be just runned off your browser) have been published in the "Examples" page.

Some documents about the Mistral project rationale and design have been published.