What's Next, after 1.9.0

Next release will mostly be a technical upgrade. Xtext and Xpand version 1.0 were released together with Eclipse Helios. We will upgrade to that.

Spring 3.0 and JPA 2.0 are also important upgrades.

Oliver will contribute with more cool stuff. He has some almost finished things that he will share with us (hopefully) soon.

The original design of Sculptor has worked fine and we will not change it, but 3 years of additions of different combinations of target implementations is starting to hurt some templates. Therefore we will remove some old (probably unused) target implementations. Those have been deprecated in 1.9.0 and in case you are using any of it you should start migration to some of the more modern alternatives:

• EJB/Spring combination => migrate to EJB3 or Spring


• EJB 2 => migrate to EJB3 or Spring


• Hibernate mapping with XML => migrate to JPA/Hibernate with annotations


• Spring definitions in XML => migrate to Spring with annotations


• Hibernate without JPA => migrate to JPA/Hibernate

This makes a good reason to use version number 2.0.0 for next release. Personally I get bad vibrations when Open Source project go to 2.0. That often means total redesign and no backwards compatibility. That will not be the case for Sculptor 2.0. It will be a cleanup, and some pieces are not supported any more, but most of it will stay intact and be compatible (with some migration steps, as usual).