This release is mostly a bug fix and maintenance release. Why not 3.0 Final? Well, we're waiting for Tomcat to be a fully supported environment for applications both internal (ICS) and external (LDSTech) before we pronounce 3.0 Final. That may be a couple of more months so expect a few more "rc" releases until then. That said version 3 should be fully stable and even though we're not officially final we're going to be careful of backwards compatible breaking changes.
Now for the list of notable changes in this release:
- Upgraded Hibernate, Spring, TestNG
- Official support for Sonar for project metrics: Sonar is a tool for collecting and providing project metrics (e.g. static analysis, Code Coverage, etc). We now have a community sonar server available at http://dev.lds.org/sonar. Take a look. If you don't see your project there and you would like it to be there please request it in this forum.
- Oracle XE VM: The Stack team has officially released a VirtualBox VM of Oracle XE. The goal of this VM is to help simplify the use of Oracle in development. Developing on a different database than you are deploying on has a number of downsides. For example:
- Potential for migration issues as developers are developing on one DB and deploying on another
- Eliminate the use of JPA as a database abstraction tool. JPA is complex and we would prefer LDSTech projects only use it if they need an ORM solution not if they need a database abstraction API.
- We would like projects to use the DB Migration tool to track Schema changes. The DB Migration tool currently works best with Oracle.
- Stack Web Security: The Stack now provides a new module specifically tailored for security in web development. This module currently includes a full suite of escaping utilities for webapps and will eventually be the home for several other security based tools we wish to add such as a Cross Site Request Forgery framework, a XSS safe HTML validator, and much more. For more information view the Web Security reference documentation.
- The latest version of TestNG no longer requires a "classifier" be specified. After upgrading you will need to remove this classifier from your TestNG dependencies.
- We've completely refactored Maven configuration of the Tomcat deploy plugin. After upgrading your project will no longer automatically deploy to tomcat as part of the build process. The best way to fix this is:
- Create a new project with Stack starter and compare the pom.xml changes with a new blank project.
- Reply to this post and request help upgrading. We'll upgrade your project as soon as we can and provide your project with a patch.
- We upgraded the version of jstl we're using to 1.2. This version no longer requires a "standard" dependency. You will need to delete the "standard" dependency from your project.
Thanks,
Mike