What's new in GraniteDS 1.2

GDS 1.2 brings a lot a bug fixes and a consequent number of new features.

1. The Gravity implementation for Tomcat with APR/NIO has been completely rewritten since 1.1 and is now a lot more stable. Additionally there is now Gravity support for JBossWeb, which is a modified Tomcat included in JBoss 5.0.0 GA.

2. We are starting to integrate new JPA providers and application servers. GDS 1.2 comes with a specific integration for TopLink (used in GlassFish V2, Sun AS and Oracle AS) and EclipseLink (RI for JPA 2.0 and used in GlassFish V3). It also brings a specific security service for GlassFish (really only a slightly modified Tomcat service). GDS 1.3 will bring additional support for WebLogic (security service and Kodo/OpenJPA) and probably other major open source JPA providers (JPOX/DataNucleus). Most likely we won't provide new specific Gravity integrations until there are more information and details on the timeline for the servlet 3 specification. For users wanting to use Gravity without the thread blocking issues, it seems possible though to benefit from the Jetty continuations mechanism in any application server by just putting the jetty-util.jar in WEB-INF/lib and setting the Gravity Jetty servlet.

3. Tide for Seam now fully supports Seam 2.1 and the two example projects now run with Seam 2.1.0.SP1. That allows to remove the dependency on JSF and brings a cleaner deployment. It is also fully integrated with Seam 2.1 authorizations and it's now possible to use role-based and permission-based security on the Flex client to make some components conditionally visible or to check for access rights before trying to issue service calls. You can check the graniteds-seam project for example of such use.

4. Tide for Spring and Tide for EJB have been improved and should be fully functional on all supported combinations of application servers/data access providers. In particular Tide/Spring now works correctly with plain Hibernate, without JPA and without JTA and can use the Session API (but still requires the use of annotations). Both integrations provide zero-conf remoting, entity caching, transparent lazy loading of collections and data paging. They can also be completely integrated with the Tide client framework.

5. It is now possible to use a client-only version of the Tide client framework with any server backend (AMFPHP, RubyAMF...). In this case, available data features will be limited to simplified remoting and client entity caching. Data paging is not available out of the box but can be used with minor developments.

There are other various improvements and features. The following blog posts will describe these new features in more details.