I'm pleased to announce that Remedie 0.6 is now released, and it has lots of goodies. Mac OS X users can download the binary to upgrade, while other users can check out and upgrade its CPAN dependencies with "perl Makefile.PL && make installdeps".
Performance Boost
The biggest update in Remedie 0.6.0 is its much better performance.
Previously if you have 50 channels in your Remedie collection, it might take 3-5 minutes to refresh all channels, depending how big your feeds are and slow your network is. But with 0.6.0 refreshing channels are done with non-blocking IO and multi-tasking programming, so it would just take like 0.5-1 sec per channel, and the best part is that you can control Remedie user interface while channes are being refreshed. The look & feel haven't changed a lot, but this backend performance update is HUGE.
I also made a lot of optimization in the code that does parsing feeds and scraping content to use libxml libraries rather than pure perl implementation, which makes the content parsing much faster with less memory usage.
No (or less) memory leaks
What you wouldn't like with software that runs on your desktop is that when they eat a lot of memory. I can't count how many times I every day need to restart Safari when it hogs the laptop memory and makes the system slow down a lot. Previously Remedie (and its backend Plagger) had a severe bug in leaking memories when you refresh a channel (feed), so every time when you refresh all channels, the memory Remedie server process uses grows up and up. In 0.6.0 most of the memory leaks, at least happening on Perl land is fixed. I still observe a slight memory usage increase when I refresh all channels multiple times, but it's getting much smaller.
Realtime Comet Messaging and iPhone Remote
The benefit of using asynchronous event loop and multitasking thread programming environment is that it not only doesn't block UI, but also allows advanced pub-sub messaging system like Comet. In this release I implemented a very basic Comet messaging channel between the browser UI and Remedie server, and that allows you to use iPhone (or any other Mobile Webkit based browsers like Android, Iris or Palm Pre) to actually "control" Remedie running your browser.
This is a huge UI improvement, and you can now use your iPhone or iPod touch to control Remedie on your TV, while sitting on your couch, without messing with Bluetooth wireless keyboard etc. Daisuke Murase actually made a pretty simple Bonjour browser for iPhone that finds Remedie running on your local network and use Safari.app to launch Remedie Remote, which is very nice.
UPDATE: 0.6.0 binary had a critical bug that it doesn't create the database cleanly if you haven't previously installed Remedie, also it didn't have the fast C based event library, both of which are fixed with the new 0.6.3 binary.
