Sinbad 1.0 Release Notes
July 2016

A reimplementation of the initial Java prototype that maintains the same overall interface and features while providing major improvements.

Changes

- Reorganization of code package structure

- Implemented abstraction over data sources 
  Makes it easy to provide "plugins" directly for new data sources/formats (see core.access, core.infer, and data.xml/data.csv/data.json for examples) rather than using XML as the common intermediate format.

- Algorithms for schema inference and data binding reimplemented over this abstraction (see core.ops.*)

- Improved cache control

- Caching of inferred schemas as well as the data itself

- Data source specification files use JSON instead of XML representation (see core.spec)

- Ability to generate and save data source specifications from automatically inferred data (to enable tweaking/refining the exposed data)

- Improvements to zip file handling ("fileentry" option of a data source enables specification of the file to extract and use from a zip file) (known issue: zip files are downloaded twice before being cached)

- Prints dots (....) in console as data is being downloaded/processed