The ModeShape community is proud to announce the immediately availability of our fourth 4.0 pre-release, ModeShape 4.0.0.Alpha4. The JARs and other artifacts are available in the JBoss Maven repository and in our downloads area, and will be soon in Maven Central. See our Getting Started guide for details.
Thanks to our whole community for the work that’s gone into this release!
What’s new?
This alpha release contains a number of fixes on top of the fixes and features in the previous alpha releases. We’ve made some improvements to the new query engine, including initial support for CONTAINS. We’ve also improved the index provider SPI, and have started implementing the local provider. Perhaps the biggest new feature is the redesigned Repository Explorer web application.
Alpha4 also includes changes that were in Alpha1, Alpha2 and Alpha3, including simpler clustering. ModeShape now automatically piggybacks on the Infinispan clustering configuration, and nothing clustering-specific is needed in the ModeShape configuration. We’re also improving how ModeShape logs events so that it’s far easier and less time-consuming to have processes (re)join the cluster.
As of 4.0.0.Alpha1, ModeShape uses Infinispan 6.0, and that comes with improved performance and several very attractive cache stores, especially the one for LevelDB. And ModeShape 4.0.0.Alpha4 can deploy on Wildfly 8.0, making it very easy for your applications to simply look up and use repositories that managed using Wildfly tooling and configuration.
ModeShape 4.0 is also licensed under the Apache Software License (ASL) 2.0, and we no longer require Contributor License Agreements (CLAs).
What’s next?
We hope that the next release is our first beta, meaning we hope to have completed all of the features. We’ll keep releasing betas until the codebase is stable, at which point we’ll start issuing candidate releases and ultimately a final release.
So our next step is to complete the index providers for the file system and Lucene, and to then start putting the whole new query system through its paces. If anyone is interested in helping us with index providers for Solr and ElasticSearch, please let us know; without some contributions they will likely be available in 4.1. However, we’d love to get feedback on the index provider SPI before 4.0.0.Final.
What can you do?
Although this is an alpha release not suitable for production, we’d really appreciate the community picking up this release and at least putting it through the basics. Try it out and see how Infinispan 6 works, how much faster it is, and try one of the new and high-performance cache stores. Try out ModeShape in Wildfly 8. Give queries a whirl, and let us know if there are any queries that worked in 3.x no longer work in 4.x; remember they’ll probably be slower than in 3.x because we don’t have any indexes yet.
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