Release Notes for ModeShape 3.5.0.Final

This document outlines the changes that were made in ModeShape 3.5.0.Final. We hope you enjoy it!

What's new

3.5.0.Final provides a fast, elastic, distributed hierarchical database that clients work with via the standard JCR 2.0 (JSR-283) API. ModeShape 3 is a major upgrade over 2.x and offers significant improvements in performance and scalability, while retaining all of ModeShape 2's JCR-related features. ModeShape 3 has complete integration with JBoss EAP 6.1, allowing deployed components to simply lookup and use repositories managed by ModeShape's service.

This release addesses 14 issues, most of which are bug fixes in lots of areas. Several workspace clone and merge bugs were fixed, and we've remedied the missing optimization when not using JCR ACLs (see MODE-2004). If you're using 3.4 but not using ACLs, please be sure to upgrade to get this optimization. The JCR ACL feature is still considered a technology preview.

NOTE: If after upgrading the ACL feature doesn't seem function correctly, try creating and saving a new ACL. (If this ACL is not needed, you can immediately remove it and re-save.) This will ensure that the non-ACL optimization added in 3.5 is disabled and that ACL checks are performed correctly.

This release adds support for monitoring repositories via JMX, and also adds a "simple" reference that is similar to JCR weak references except no back-references are maintained (improving performance for nodes that are referenced by lots of reference properties). Since "simple" references are not defined in the JCR specification, you'll need to use the ModeShape-specific API to create simple references using the session's value factory.

As with 3.4.0.Final, this release includes a kit that can be installed into EAP 6.1.0.GA.

Features

ModeShape 3.5.0.Final has these features:

• ModeShape uses Infinispan for all caching and storage, giving a powerful and flexible foundation for creating JCR repositories that are fast, scalable, and highly available. Infinispan offers a great deal of storage options (via cache loaders), but using Infinispan as a distributed, mulit-site, in-memory data grid provides incredible scalability and performance.
• Strongly consistent. ModeShape is atomic, consistent, isolated and durable (ACID), so writing applications is very natural. Applications can even use JTA transactions.
• Fast. ModeShape 3 is just plain seriously fast, and performance is all-around faster than 2.x - most operations are at least one if not several orders of magnitude faster! We'll publish performance and benchmarking results soon.
• Larger content. ModeShape 3 has been designed to store and access the content so that a node can have hundreds of thousands (or more!) of child nodes (even with same-name-siblings) yet still be incredibly fast. Additionally, repositories can scale to many millions of nodes and be deployed across many processes.
• Simplified configuration. There is no more global configuration of the engine; instead, each repository is configured with a separate JSON file, which must conform to a ModeShape-specific JSON Schema and can be validated by ModeShape prior to use. Repository configurations can even be changed while the repository is running (some restrictions apply), making it possible to add/change/remove sequencers, authorization providers, and many other configuration options while the repository is in use.
• Elastic. Add processes to scale out, without having to have a single coordinator.
• Deploy, start, stop and undeploy repositories while the engine is running and while and other repositories are still in use.
• Sessions immediately see all changes persisted/committed by other sessions, although transient changes made by the session always take precedence.
• Monitoring API with over a dozen metrics.
• Sequencing SPI that uses the JCR API to get at the content being processed and create/update the derived content. Sequencers can also dynamically register namespaces and node types. Now it's easy to create custom sequencers.
• Connector SPI that defines how external systems are accessed and optionally updated to project the external information into the repository as regular nodes.
• Simple API for implementing custom MIME type detectors. ModeShape still has a built-in Tika-based detector that determines MIME types using the filename extensions and binary content.
• Simple API for implementing custom text extractors, which extracts from binary values searchable text used in full-text searches and queries.
• Ability to store binary values of any sizes, with a separate facility for storing these on the file system, in Infinispan caches, in relational DBMSes (via JDBC), and in MongoDB. Custom stores are also possible.
• Public API interfaces and methods that were deprecated in 2.7.0.Final (or later) have been removed. There weren't many of these; most of the ModeShape API remains the same as 2.x.
• Integration with JBoss AS 7. ModeShape runs as an integrated subsystem within AS7, and the AS7 tooling can be used to define and manage repositories independently of each other and while the server is running.
• Local and remote JDBC drivers for issuing JCR-SQL2 queries and getting database metadata via the JDBC API
• Use the RESTful API to talk to ModeShape repositories from non-Java and non-local applications
• Use the CMIS API to talk to ModeShape repositories
• Use WebDAV to mount ModeShape repositories as file servers

All of the JCR 2.0 features previously supported in 2.x are currently supported:

Accessing the Repository

• RepositoryFactory access
• JNDI registration of Repository
• JAAS Authentication
• Servlet Authentication
• Custom Authentication

Namespaces

• Session Remapping
• Permanent Addition/Deletion

Reading Repository Content

• Traversal Access
• Direct Access
• Same-Name Siblings
• Multi-Value Properties
• All Property Types Supported
• Property Type Conversion

Writing Repository Content

• Create/Update/Delete Nodes
• Create/Update/Delete Properties (Through Parent Nodes)
• Moving, Copying, Cloning
• Adding/Removing Mixins
• Referential integrity enforcement

Query / Search

• XPath
• JCR-SQL
• JCR-SQL2
• JCR-QOM
• Full-Text Search

Importing/Exporting Repository Content

• System View Import/Export
• Document View Import/Export

Node Types

• Inheritance Among Node Types
• Discovering available Node Types
• Discovering the Node Types of a Node
• Discovering the Definition of a Node Type
• Property Constraints
• Automatic Item Creation
• Predefined standard Node Types
• Custom Node Type Registration (CND-Based and and JCR 2.0 API Template-Based)

Repository Metadata under System Node

• Permanent Namespace Mappings
• Node Types (Built-In and User-Registered)
• Active Locks

Other JCR Optional Features

• Observation
• Locking
• Versioning
• Shareable nodes
• Access controls

Content Storage Options

• In-memory (local, replicated, and distributed)
• BerkleyDB
• Relational databases (via JDBC), including in-memory, file-based, or remote
• File system
• Cassandra
• Cloud storage (e.g., Amazon's S3, Rackspace's Cloudfiles, or any other provider supported by JClouds)
• Remote Infinispan

Binary Storage Options

• File system
• JDBC database
• Infinispan
• MongoDB
• Chained binary stores

ModeShape also has features that go beyond the JCR API:

ModeShape Federation Connectors

• File system connector (read and write)
• Git repository connector (read-only)
• CMIS reposiotry connector (read and write, tech preview)

ModeShape Sequencers

• Compact Node Definition (CND) Sequencer
• DDL Sequencer
• Image Sequencer
• Java Source Sequencer
• Java Class Sequencer
• MP3 Sequencer
• MS Office Sequencer
• Text Sequencers (Delimited and Fixed Width)
• XML Sequencer
• XML Schema Document (XSD) Sequencer
• Web Service Definition Lanaguage (WSDL) 1.1 Sequencer
• Zip File Sequencer (also WARs, JARs, and EARs)
• Teiid Relational Model Sequencer
• Teiid VDB Sequencer

ModeShape Deployment/Access Models

• JNDI-Based Deployment
• Deploy as a subsystem in JBoss AS7, with access to repositories via @Resource injection
• Deploy to other containers using ModeShape's JCA adapter
• Access through two RESTful Services (the 2.x-compatible API and a new improved API)
• Access through WebDAV Service
• Access through CMIS Service
• Local and remote JDBC drivers for accessing ModeShape content through JDBC API and JCR-SQL2 queries
• Embedded (in Server or JEE Archive) Deployment
• JTA support, allowing Sessions to participate in XA and container-managed transactions
• OSGi-Compatible Archives

Other ModeShape features

• Repository-wide backup and restoration
• Automatic MIME type detection of binary content
• Asynchronous sequencing operations, within completion notified via events

Bug Fixes, Features, and other Issues

The following are the bugs, features and other issues that have been fixed in the 3.5.0.Final release:

Bug

• MODE-2012 - Workspace cloning works not properly
• MODE-2010 - WebDAV throws exception when working with node that has a multi-valued property
• MODE-2011 - Error Occurred When Publishing File But Client Was Not Notified
• MODE-2016 - AccessControlManagerImpl the default JcrAccessControlList is called with path instead of username
• MODE-2007 - Workspace fails to clone direct children of root node
• MODE-2006 - Merge operation fails to correctly process children that are same-name siblings, and does not correctly clone and remove child nodes
• MODE-2009 - Delete workspace should also delete child nodes permanently
• MODE-2015 - Sequencer removeDerivedContentWithOriginal configuration option is ignored

Enhancement

• MODE-2013 - Connector base class should (also) expose the simpler API Logger
• MODE-2004 - ACL permission checking should only be engaged when the first ACL is added to a repository
• MODE-2008 - Configure REST service to be read-only for all repositories

Feature Request

• MODE-1969 - Add support for unidirectional references based on identifiers
• MODE-1989 - Add support for JMX managed beans
• MODE-1970 - Improve performance of (WEAK)REFERENCEs