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Release 4.0: 🚄 Faster actor testing and modularized expressions

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Earlier this year, Comunica version 3.0 was released, which introduced better querying planning across data sources and several convenience features. Since then, we had several minor releases introducing multiple additions and performance improvements. In release 3.2, we introduced better techniques for discovering performance bottleneck. This allowed us identify some low-level bottlenecks in the internals of Comunica which limited performance. Fixing these issues requires breaking changes to the internal API of Comunica, which is the main reason for this major update. As a result of these changes, we see performance improvements of 20% to 40%. Breaking changes are limited to internal Comunica APIs. This means that developers that make use of Comunica can have their cake and eat it 🎂; no breaking changes and gaining a performance boost.

Release 3.2: 🔎 Knowing what to optimize

Friday, July 5, 2024

For this release, we mainly focused on improving tooling to more easily track down performance issues. Concretely, we improved our query explain output, started running multiple benchmarks in our CI to avoid performance regressions, and applied several performance improvements that were identified following these changes.

Release 3.1: 🌱 New package with tiny bundle size

Saturday, May 11, 2024

The primary addition in this release is the new @comunica/query-sparql-rdfjs-lite package, which is optimized for small browser bundle size. Currently, the minified size of this package is 648,88 KB (145,79 KB when gzipped). This is about as small as you can get without removing required functionality from the SPARQL 1.1 spec But if you don't need everything from SPARQL 1.1, it could get much smaller even!

Release 3.0: 🔥 Blazingly fast federation over heterogeneous sources

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

More than 2 years ago, we released Comunica version 2.0, which featured many internal and external API changes that significantly simplified its usage. Today, we release version 3.0, which focuses more on internal changes, with limited changes to the external API. Most of the changes relate to the handling of data sources during query planning, which allows more efficient query plans to be produced when querying over federations of heterogeneous sources. This means that for people using Comunica, the number of breaking changes in this update are very limited. Things will simplify be faster in general, and some small convenience features have been added, such as results being async iterable. To developers extending Comunica with custom actors, there will be some larger breaking changes.

Release 2.8.0: Support for quoted triples (RDF-star and SPARQL-star)

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

This minor release focuses on a single but significant new feature: support for quoted triples.

Release 2.7.0: Better date support, better performance over SPARQL endpoints, and internal fixes

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Today, we released a new minor update, which brings exciting new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Below, you can find an overview of the main changes.

Release 2.5.0: Fixes, string sources, and HTTP error handling

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

We just released a new small update. Here's an overview of the main changes.

Release 2.4.0: Better browser support and performance improvements

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

We just released a new minor version of Comunica. Here's an overview of the main changes.

Official launch of the Comunica Association

Thursday, July 14, 2022

As previously announced, we will be officially launching the Comunica Association during the fall of this year. More concretely, we are organizing an online launch event on the 7th of September, and we will be physically present at the Semantics conference in Vienna the week afterwards.

Release 2.3.0: Better timeout support and minor enhancements

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

It's been a while since our latest blog post, so here's a small announcement on the latest 2.3.0 release.

Release 2.0.0: A new major release with radical simplifications and performance improvements

Thursday, March 3, 2022

Since its initial release a couple of years ago, Comunica has grown a lot, but it has always remained fully backwards-compatible with every update. However, as with every software project, there is sometimes a need to make breaking changes so that old mechanisms can be replaced with better, newer ones. With this update, we have aggregated several breaking changes into one large update, all of which should improve the lives of users one way or another. Below, the primary changes are listed.

Comunica Association Memberships

Monday, November 8, 2021

Earlier this year, we announced the Comunica Association, which is a non-profit organization that aims to make Comunica sustainable in the long term. In this post, we announce the possibility to become a member or sponsor to the association, allowing organizations to drive the future roadmap of Comunica. We plan an official launch in fall 2022, up until when organizations can choose to become a founding member of the Comunica Association.

Release 1.22.0: Improved update support, extension functions, and improved CLI handling

Monday, August 30, 2021

The 1.22.0 version features some major additions, and a bunch of smaller internal fixes and performance improvements 🚀! The primary changes that are discussed in this post are support for more SPARQL update destination types, SPARQL extension functions, and rewritten CLI handling.

Announcing the Comunica Association, and a Bounty Program

Monday, June 21, 2021

In this post, we announce the creation of the Comunica Association, and the introduction of a new bounty system using which organizations and companies can fund development of new features and the fixing of bugs, and through which developers can take up these bounties and get paid.

Release 1.21.0: Hypermedia-based SPARQL Updating

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

The 1.21.0 version is a smaller release, that mainly introduces the necessary wiring to enable hypermedia-driven SPARQL update querying, which lays the foundations for highly flexible updating of heterogeneous destinations, such as Solid data pods.

In other words, this provides the necessary ✨_magic_✨ for updating many different types of things.

Release 1.20.0: SPARQL Update support

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

With this new 1.20.0 release, we bring support for SPARQL Update queries to Comunica. Next to this, several enhancements were made to improve developer experience, minor new features, and important bug fixes.

Release 1.19.0: Simplifications for extensions

Monday, January 18, 2021

The 1.19.0 release focuses on simplications for developing Comunica extension. It contains no significant fixes or changes for end-users.

Release 1.18.0: Smaller Web bundles and Microdata parsing

Monday, November 2, 2020

This post gives a brief overview of the new 1.18.0 release.

Hacktoberfest and Release 1.17.0

Friday, September 25, 2020

In this post, we give an overview of contribution possibilities during Hacktoberfest, and the newly released 1.17.0 version.

Release 1.16.0: Full spec compliance, property paths, CSV/TSV, basic auth, and fixes

Monday, August 24, 2020

With the latest release of Comunica, we have achieved the major milestone of full compliance to the SPARQL 1.1 specification. While Comunica has had support for all SPARQL 1.1 operators for a while, some small parts were not always fully handled according to the spec, and property paths were not fully supported.

Thanks to the help of several students over the summer, these issues have been resolved, and all tests from the SPARQL 1.1 test suite now pass.

A New Website for Comunica

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

We're happy to present a brand new website for Comunica! 🎉 Don't know that Comunica is? Read about it here.

This new version contains all basic information around Comunica. Additionally, it contains guides on how to query with Comunica, and how to modify or extend it.