Getting ready for OpenCPU 1.3

The OpenCPU public demo server and ocpu.io have been upgraded to an early version of the upcoming OpenCPU 1.3 release. This release is scheduled for April 17 along with Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty). By deploying it on the public demo server we get some testing before the actual release. Please report any problems.

New in OpenCPU 1.3

The improvements in this release are mostly internal. However there will be one subtle change: starting version 1.3, all HTTP API responses with status code 201, 301 or 302 will use an absolute url in the Location response header. For example, the response headers of a request could contain:

...
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 06:59:26 GMT
Location: http://public.opencpu.org/ocpu/tmp/x0e28afb7/
Content-Length: 44
...

Whereas in previous versions, the same response would have looked like:

...
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 06:59:26 GMT
Location: /ocpu/tmp/x0e28afb7/
Content-Length: 44
...

However to scale up to distributed environments where resources can be hosted on various servers, we need to start using absolute URLs.

How to update my client/app?

Most HTTP clients natively understand both absolute and relative urls, so you probably won’t notice the difference. For example the opencpu.js client library requires no changes or updates. However for the few of you that implemented a custom OpenCPU client, you might want to double check that your code understands both absolute and relative urls in the Location header, to make sure your application will be compatible with future versions of OpenCPU.