This document provided a very high-level overview of ModeShape, introducing you to some basic concepts and showing what would be required to use ModeShape in your own application. We saw two simple examples that showed two different aspects of ModeShape: the sequencing system and the connector system. Each of these examples showed how to create a ModeShape configuration, how to start up the ModeShape engine, and how to then access a javax.jcr.Repository instance, and after that your application just uses the standard JCR API.
For a more in-depth description of ModeShape and the internal workings, see our Reference Guide. This also describes how to write your own custom sequencers or connectors. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to use ModeShape's discussion forums, or chat with the developers in the IRC chat room. If you find a bug or have a suggestion, please let us know or (better yet) create a new issue in the project's JIRA issue management system . If there's something in particular you're interested in, talk with the community - there may be others interested in the same thing.
Although ModeShape 2.8.0.Final includes several improvements and minor features, this release is primarily a bug-fix release, with numerous fixes for issues reported against 2.1 and 2.2. For details, see the release notes.
ModeShape implements all of the required JCR 2.0 features: repository acquisition, authentication, reading/navigating, query, export, node type discovery, and permissions and capability checking. ModeShape also implements most of the optional JCR 2.0 features: writing, import, observation, workspace management, versioning, locking, node type management, same-name siblings, orderable child nodes, and shareable nodes. The remaining optional features (access control management, lifecycle management, retention and hold, and transactions) may be introduced in future versions.
However, the ModeShape community has already started working on ModeShape 3.0, which will have some significant changes, including dramatic performance improvements and scalability through the use of the Infinispan distributed cache.
Getting involvedIf you're interested in getting involved with the ModeShape project, take a look at our community pages, and consider picking up one of the sequencers or connectors on our roadmap. Or, check out JIRA for the list of features we've thought of. If you think of one that's not there, please add it to JIRA!