Apache Jackrabbit 1.4 is available!

I just announced the release of Apache Jackrabbit 1.4. The release is the result of about nine months of development since the 1.3 release, and contains 220 new features, improvements, and bug fixes (plus the 75 bug fixes that had already been backported to 1.3.x patch releases). This is by far the biggest Jackrabbit release to date.

The 1.4 release contains some cool new features:

• Friendlier Jackrabbit webapp. The jackrabbit-webapp component now comes with a more polished user interface, better error handling, and improved repository connectivity for local and remote clients.


• Object/content mapping framework. The jackrabbit-ocm component maps Java objects to JCR nodes and vice versa, making it possible to persist normal Java objects in a content repository.


• Service provider interface for JCR. The jackrabbit-spi component defines an architectural layer below the JCR API. The SPI layer is designed specifically for remote access and outlines a way for us to avoid the performance limitations of JCR-RMI that works on top of JCR.


• Optimized storage for binary content. The new DataStore feature in jackrabbit-core avoids all unnecessary copying of binary content and promises huge performance increases for versioning and copying operations. DataStore is a beta-level feature in Jackrabbit 1.4 and disabled by default.


• Improved query engine. The jackrabbit-core component has been extended with new features like configurable indexing, synonym and similarity queries, and spell checking. Many typical queries are now noticeably faster than before thanks to numerous performance improvements.

Many thanks to the Jackrabbit development team and the entire community! I'm really proud and excited to be a member of the Apache Jackrabbit project.

PS. Interestingly enough, I built the final 1.4 release candidate exactly two years after I first volunteered to be the release manager for Apache Jackrabbit. The past two years have certainly been interesting time. :-)