News Items for Apr 06, 2006 - Apache Cayenne

1.2 Beta is here. Finally! It's been a while since December 6, 2004 when 1.1 was released, so I am glad that we are wrapping up 1.2 and not turning it into a Windows Vista

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User Impact

The API is now frozen, so the users should feel more comfortable upgrading to 1.2. Cayenne developers will be fixing remaining bugs. If you find more bugs, please report them via Jira. The documentation effort will also be catching up. Right now I'd recommend to use the docs from Wiki instead of the User Guide bundled with the release, as the former is much more up to date.

New Features in 1.2

The minor version increase should not fool anybody - 1.2 is a major new release. Aside from organizational changes there are significant improvements of the core framework. Here are a few highlights:

A reworked access stack that is now interface-based, modular and highly customizable.
Customizable Queries
Remote Object Persistence - an ORM distributed via web services.
Nested DataContexts
Extendable cgen task
XML serialization of DataObjects
Automatic database (and in some cases - version) detection and "smart" configuration of DbAdapter.

For the full list of new features follow this link.

What's New Since the Last M12 Milestone

There are two new things - nested DataContext events (so that peer DataContexts can synchronize with each other whenever their parent is updated) and performance improvements in the Remote Objects Persistence client tier. Also there are lots of bugs fixed. Here is a full list of changes:

* DataObjectUtils.objectForQuery(..) now returns Object instead of DataObject to accomodate DataRows, 
  Persistent objects, etc. If you are using this method, you may need to use a cast.
* "opp" package and all classes whose names started with OPP* were renamed. Check a 'web.xml' 
  descriptor and change the following configuration parameters to reflect the new names:
  
  - {{cayenne.OPPRemoteService.EventBridge.factory}} to {{cayenne.RemoteService.EventBridge.factory}}
  - {{org.objectstyle.cayenne.opp.hessian.HessianServlet}} to {{org.objectstyle.cayenne.remote.hessian.service.HessianServlet}}
  
* WebApplicationListener and WebApplicationContextProvider are deprecated. Now the official choice for webapp
  configuration is WebApplicationContextFilter. Still users are free to use custom listeners if they choose to do 
  so, i.e. the deprecation is done to reduce confusion regarding the choices, not because the listener approach doesn't work.
  
* CAY-471	Nested DataContexts - change notifications
* CAY-474	Delete Rules in remote CayenneContext
* CAY-485	Modeler gives cryptic method in alert box when user tries to create classes
* CAY-473	Better caching in remote CayenneContext
* CAY-472	Remoting Layer: Hessian sessions and session timeouts
* CAY-491	Support Schemas for HSQLDB 1.8 during schema generation
* CAY-479	Reverse engineer does not load target FKs on partial import (in fact this was already fixed in M12)
* CAY-490	On client class generation, cgen should automatically filter out entities that are explicitly not supported on the client
* CAY-391	Exposing Primary Key to objEntity from dbEntity and then synching
* CAY-346	Selection moves to next entity on sync
* CAY-484	Add missing toolbar to the DbEntity panel