Hi, Here's my first shot at a release plan for Jackrabbit 1.5. There's been a lot of talk about the next release and related release processes on various forums, and I wanted to summarize a plan here to keep everyone up to date and the momentum going towards the release. For some background information, see also the (tentative) roadmap presentation I gave last week during the JCR meetup in Amsterdam: http://www.slideshare.net/day/jackrabbit-roadmap-356326
Release Goal As discussed after the 1.4 release, there's still a lot we can and should do to improve the out of the box experience with Jackrabbit. I think this should be the primary goal for Jackrabbit 1.5, and thus I consider the issues JCR-1455 (content explorer) and JCR-1357 (quick start) to be the driving features of the 1.5 release. In addition to the source code, the main release artifact should be a self-contained runnable jar that starts up a Jackrabbit repository with WebDAV, RMI, and browser-based content explorer features. There are a number of things going on within trunk, especially in relation to JSR 283, but for 1.5 these new features only need to stable enough that they don't break things if people are *not* using them. Most notably the 1.5 release will still be based on JCR 1.0, and more extensive changes towards JCR 2.0 should only take place after 1.5 has been branched. Other fixes, improvements and new features will be included in the 1.5 release as they become available in trunk. Release Structure There's been a lot of debate about component releases lately, and I think we'll be doing a number of things along those lines already for 1.5, but the exact details still need to be worked out. Most notably I'd like to introduce the concept of the "Apache Jackrabbit product", i.e. a self-contained repository implementation that consists of and integrates the individual components that we have. The version number of that release will be 1.5 and future releases will follow a typical 1.5.x, 1.6, 2.0, ... pattern, but the underlying components would be free to evolve following their own release cycles. Release Schedule I'd like to push for us to have the release out during this quarter, i.e. by the end of June. The long delay between 1.3 and 1.4 was IMHO a mistake, and I'd like to work towards a schedule where we'd have a new minor release roughly once per quarter. Where necessary I'd rather postpone features than releases. The Q2 schedule for 1.5 basically means that we should have the major new features (runnable jar deployment, content explorer) in trunk latest in May. That's a fairly tight schedule, but I'm confident that we can make it since the required work is mostly about integrating existing code and solutions. I'd be happy if we could branch 1.5 sometime in late May, and have the first release candidates out for testing in early June. Of course the schedule can and probably will need to be adjusted somewhat, but I'll try to keep everyone posted by updating this release plan. BR, Jukka Zitting
