Release Notes for ModeShape 4.0.0.Alpha2

This document outlines the changes that were made in ModeShape 4.0.0.Alpha2. We hope you enjoy it!

What's new

4.0.0.Alpha2 provides a fast, elastic, distributed hierarchical database that clients work with via the standard JCR 2.0 (JSR-283) API. ModeShape 4 is a major upgrade over 3.x and offers significant improvements in clustering, performance, query, and events. All JCR 2.0 features are supported, and ModeShape 4 has complete integration with Wildfly 8, allowing deployed applications to simply lookup and use repositories managed by ModeShape's service.

As of 4.0.0.Alpha1, ModeShape is licensed under the Apache Software License, 2.0.

This is the second alpha release of the 4.0 stream, and it includes several fixes and new features. The previous alpha release introduced a new query engine that allows clients to explicitly define the indexes used in the query system, and this second alpha release brings minor changes to the Service Provider Interface (SPI) for query providers. Version 4.0.0.Alpha2 does introduce a programmatic API and configuration modifications for defining indexes, although no complete query providers are included (see next release).

Additionally, this release has support for the JCR event journal feature, allowing applications to poll for changes that occurred during time ranges. This is a useful alternative to listeners that may be expensive or time-consuming.

What to test

Since this is an alpha release, not all features targeted to 4.0 are complete, and there are likely bugs with some of the newer features. Therefore, please do not put 4.0.0.Alpha2 into production.

However, we would like to get as much feedback as possible, so we do ask that our community do limited testing with 4.0.0.Alpha2 to help us identify problems. Specifically, we ask that you test the following areas:

• JDK - ModeShape now requires JDK 7. We've not yet begun testing with Java 8, but we'd be happy to hear about it if you do.
• Queries - although there are known issues (see MODE-2178 for details), we think that most queries will work, albeit a bit slower, especially on medium or large repositories. We'll increase speed by adding indexes in a forthcoming release, but in the meantime please check that your queries work. If not, please file an issue.
• Clustering - ModeShape no longer has a clustering section in its configuration, since we simply piggyback on top of Infinispan's clustering setup. We've also upgraded to a newer version of JGroups.
• Journalling - Try enabling journaling and verify it works and does not affect performance. You can't yet see what's in the journals, but even some modest testing with journaling enabled will help us.
• Infinispan - We've moved to Infinispan 6.0.1.Final, which is faster and has new cache stores. Some older and poorly-performaing cache stores are no longer valid, so check out the new file-based cache stores. Also, the LevelDB cache store is supposedly very fast.
• Backup and restore - given that some older Infinispan cache stores are no longer supported, in order to test migrating 3.x repositories to 4.0 you will need to use ModeShape's backup and restore feature. If you don't regularly use that, please test it with your repository. Just be sure not to overwrite any 3.x repositories.
• Bugs - we've fixed a number of bugs reported against 3.x; see the list below for details. All these are ready for testing.
• Configuration - comments are now allowed in our JSON configuration.

Features

ModeShape 4.0.0.Alpha2 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 4 is just plain seriously fast, and performance is all-around faster than earlier version.
• Larger content. ModeShape 4 can 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
• Visual repository explorer web application

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)
• Relational databases (via JDBC), including in-memory, file-based, or remote
• LevelDB
• 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)
• JDBC metadata connector (read-only)

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
• Access through visual repository explorer web application
• 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 4.0.0.Alpha2 release:

Bug

• MODE-2017 - Move doesn't work with CMIS connector
• MODE-2125 - Exceptions when Teiid's JDBC translator uses ModeShape's JDBC DatabaseMetaData implementation
• MODE-2193 - Calling Node.getNodes() throws java.util.NoSuchElementException when applying ACLs
• MODE-2180 - Same named properties allowed in REST API
• MODE-2179 - Error using MS SQL Server 2008 DB as binary store
• MODE-2186 - Iterating children via the getNodes() methods does not check ACLs
• MODE-2189 - File system connector's generated events should match similar operations with internal nodes
• MODE-2176 - FileSystemConnector config not updated when repository.json is updated
• MODE-2171 - Importing document view XML with ACLs enabled raises exception
• MODE-2192 - Error on importXML

Enhancement

• MODE-2182 - Inefficient creation of nodes with large binary content

Feature Request

• MODE-2019 - Support JCR event journal functionality
• MODE-2188 - Manage custom indexes

Task

• MODE-2191 - Rename the federation SPI package