ZODB3 and ZEO2 beta releases

[Jeremy Hylton]

I am pleased to announce the second beta releases of ZODB3 and ZEO2.
These are the last beta releases.  We expect to release the final
versions in two weeks.

ZODB is an object database for Python that provides transactional
persistence while requiring few, if any, changes to application logic.
ZEO is a client-server storage system for ZODB.  The ZEO2 package is
released on its own and as part of ZODB3.  The separate release is for
Zope users, who already have ZODB.

You can get source releases from http://www.zope.org/Products/StandaloneZODB 
and http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO.  The ZODB3 release requires a C
compiler, while the ZEO2 release is pure Python.

The components you get with the ZODB3 release are as follows:

- Core ZODB, including the persistence machinery
- Standard storages such as FileStorage
- Supporting modules such as ExtensionClass
- The persistent BTrees modules
- ZEO (versions 1 and 2)
- Experimental Berkeley storages
- Updated documentation

The beta release contains roughly the same version of ZODB that will
be included in Zope 2.6.  The two releases are not directly
coordinated, so there may be some subtle differences.

Many people have contributed to ZODB3.  Special thanks to Toby
Dickenson for the new ZODB Connection cache.  Many people at Zope
Corp. have contributed code and tested unreleased versions.

There were many changes and bug fixes to ZEO since the last beta
release, but very few changes to ZODB.  See the NEWS.txt file for
details. 

Jeremy