Hello.
I am +1 to start wrapping up 3.0. I want to create some modeler
documentation for the merge-stuff.
I volunteered to join in on JPA, but lost motivation. At first it
sounded like fun, but then I discovered that it was a lot of work ...
and that I would probably not use it myself. I have a lot of respect
for the work done and still think it is one of the most important
things for cayenne after joining Apache.
Regards,
- Tore.
On 18. juni. 2008, at 15.06, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
Wanted to float the idea of wrapping up 3.0 release. Contrary to
what I said in the past (3.0 final == certified JPA release), there
are a few considerations that made me change my mind in favor of 3.0
without full/any JPA:
1. Lack of momentum. We were unable to find any committed volunteers
to work on the JPA provider, even though we had maybe 5 or 6
declared volunteers, so I ended up doing all work myself. I have a
few theories why, but this is not important for this discussion.
2. My personal availability to do Cayenne work has shrunk
significantly with growing ObjectStyle consulting business. The
remaining time is spent on Cayenne classic API, driven by user
requests and my own needs.
3. The amount of new features developed in Cayenne classic in 3.0
requires some serious catching up to do - add modeler support for
many new features, write tutorials and documentation. In this
respect I think one thing is very important - communicate to our
users a clear definition of "what is Cayenne" now (i.e. the scope of
fully supported features, best practices, etc.). We've done that
pretty well in the past, but it is impossible to do it with a moving
target. There are questions being asked like "is there POJO
support?", "how do I configure cache", etc. All we can do is give a
vague answer "it sorta work, there's no modeler or documentation").
With the amount of cool new stuff, I wish we could give users more
definite answers (or maybe I am too backwards thinking, and in the
post-Web 2.0 world everybody is comfortable using nightly builds in
production, and we are wasting time with all the cleanup? :-))
Anyways... Regardless of the limited resources we've managed to
advance Cayenne 3.0 very far, and regardless of the lack of docs for
the new features, people love and use them already, so there are
lots of things to be proud of:
http://cayenne.apache.org/doc/guide-to-30-features.html
So here is the suggested plan. The development part of it is
presented from the POV of "Andrus as a Cayenne committer" (i.e. the
stuff I will be working on that does not require PMC consensus and
does not require others to follow). Release plan part will require
the PMC consensus.
DEVELOPMENT:
JPA is still on the table, only postponed till the future releases
(3.1). For now concentrate on wrapping up classic API features. Here
is an approximate (and pretty long) list:
* EJBQL missing features (constructors, flattened relationships,
better error reporting)
* Vertical Inheritance
* Multiple cayenne.xml in the project (CAY-943)
* Generating Query and Procedure Access Code (CAY-1070)
* Modeler SoC 2008
* Modeler: support for embeddables
* Modeler: support for EJBQL queries
* Tutorials
* Resolve JPA legal caveat [1]
* (plus lots of smaller features and bug fixes) :
RELEASE PLAN:
* Once major remaining features are in, we change releases suffix
from Mx to Bx ("milestone" to "beta") and go into the code freeze.
* Once we fix all bugs and write docs, we do release candidates
(somewhere here we also branch for 3.1 development)
* We release 3.0-final
* We EOL 1.2 (SourceForge) and 2.0 (Apache) branches.
Thoughts?
Andrus
[1] JPA Legal Caveat: (something to confirm on legal-discuss). We
are not allowed to release a JPA provider until it fully passes the
TCK. Per some interpretations of the JPA spec license it seems to
mean that we can't release a 3.0-final that contains JPA-nonfinal
provider jars (while we can still release milestone non-final
releases of JPA). So we'll likely have to fork JPA stuff in a
separate assembly. That's a minor detail IMO. We can easily comply.
