Maintain downgrade compatibility of Studios to older servers

land

While I like RapidMiner's continouus development philosophy and the constant improvement of the tool, I would wish to have newer Studios being able to connect to RapidMiner Server's of lower version number. In larger installations where we have a three stage environment with Development Server, Test Server and Production machine, it's not unlikely we have three different versions of RapidMiner running at the same time. Production might still be at 7.1, while Dev is already using 7.2 and we are testing 7.3 for compatibilty to upgrade all at the same time.

Unfortunately such a setup is quite troublesome: There's no single Studio being able to talk to more than one of the servers. While having three Studios installed doesn't bother me greatly, having to start one to copy Stuff from the 7.2 machine into a local repository then start another one to copy the thing from local repository into 7.1 or 7.3. is giving me headaches.

Instead of avoiding that we are causing errors because of version incompatibility, this restriction actually adds additional danger as the additional manual copying is pretty error prone and the version incompatibilities are still in there and not even detected.

So I would propose to make it possible to connect between all versions technically possible. If a process is copied from a higher version server to a lower version, then a warning should be given that can be ignored(!) The other way around should be possible always without warning as RapidMiner maintains the backward compatibility.

And while we are talking about synchronizing servers, a view for comparing two directories and synchronizing them, possibly recursively, would be veeery helpful, too.

Greetings,

Sebastian

sgenzer

land

With RapidMiner 8.2 we noticed that the downward compatibility got even worse. It seems RM Studio 8.2 uses a different format for saved passwords. So as we are forced to work with multiple installed version in parallel due to the described problem above, this now also always crashes the saved password database. Including blocking our RapidMiner accounts as we are trying to login more than 3 times with a wrong password if you switch from 8.0 to 8.2, back to 8.0 and then back to 8.2.

It seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong with my assumptions from my observations), you didn't improve downward compatibility, but actually made it much, much worse...

sgenzer

I agree Sebastian - the password issue is a nuisance. RM Dev team is very aware. I will continue to pass along the message. Perhaps@jpuentecan provide some insight...?

SGolbert

I think that compatibility inside the same major versions (current 8.X) would be helpful. And better/automatic update for Server.