We've released ZODB4 alpha 1, the first official release of the ZODB code from the Zope3 project. You can get it at http://www.zope.org/Products/ZODB4. This release contains essentially the same software that will be in the upcoming Zope3 milestone release. This version of ZODB is very different from ZODB3. The Persistent base class is a new-style class, allowing persistent objects to use many of the features of Python 2.2 new-style classes. There are still many changes planned for future versions of ZODB4, but the current release is stable enough to call an alpha. The current test suite passes with Python 2.2.2 and Python 2.3 CVS on both Linux and Windows (2k). It will be possible to migrate data out of a 4.0a1 database into some future version. This release contains the top-level persistence, transaction, and zodb packages, as well as zope.interface and zope.testing. The implementation depends on zope.interface, but only in fairly limited way. The zope.testing package is only used by a few unit tests. The zodb package includes FileStorage, two storages based on BerkeleyDB, and ZEO, a client-server protocol for ZODB. Jeremy