First off, apologies for the delay between Alpha2 and Beta1.  But...

...some big things happened and the delay was 1.) necessary to finish and test them, and 2.) completely worth it!  The deets:

• [ARTIF-683] Switch to RDBMS, JPA (Hibernate), Hibernate Search, and Hibernate 2nd Level Cache as the default persistence…
  [ARTIF-689] Remove the JCR persistence adapter - JBoss Issue Tracker
  First and foremost, although many users may consider it purely an implementation detail, the backend storage solution is completely re-written and vastly improved.  We've completely replaced the JCR approach with an RDBMS, JPA, and Hibernate Search setup.  The solution is extremely scalable, both horizontally and vertically, in addition to ridiculously flexible for upcoming new features.  Early performance results are exciting -- many queries (full-text search, most notably) are finishing several times faster than before.  But what's even more notable, at least for me, is how much simpler the code has become.  I sincerely hope that this well-known stack will further encourage the community to get involved by removing quite a bit of complexity.  Lots of discussion on ARTIF-683, if you'd like to read more.
• [ARTIF-657] Remove updateContent and deleteContent - JBoss Issue Tracker
  After many discussions, we decided to completely remove the updateContent and deleteContent capabilities.  To begin with, they were incomplete and made many assumptions.  But more importantly, they were counter-intuitive to what a "repository" should provide.  We'd rather focus on publishing new versions of the artifacts, rather than attempt to somehow properly support the (arguably not-needed) actions.  For more info, check out the JIRA and its associated forum posts.
• [ARTIF-324] UI: Edit artifact relationships - JBoss Issue Tracker
  Relationships can now be managed directly from the web UI!
• [ARTIF-311] Add support for comments associated with an Artifact - JBoss Issue Tracker
  Artifacts support free-text, user-specific comments, allowing discussions to occur directly through metadata.

As always, the release details are here (including a few other minor JIRAs that I didn't mention): Release Notes - JBoss Issue Tracker

Note that this should be considered the feature-freeze for 1.0.  However, we plan to immediately launch into some new awesomeness for 1.1.

One other thing to note: we finally have a logo and new branding!  Check out the website (Software Artifact, Metadata, and Information Repository (Open Source) · Artificer), Twitter (Artificer (@ArtificerRepo) | Twitter), etc. to see it in action.  We'd love to hear your thoughts.  Oh, and you deserve to purchase yourself a T-Shirt: Artificer on Twitter: "Also, Artificer mugs, buttons, and t-shirts make great birthday gifts for your loved ones http…

Download: http://downloads.jboss.org/artificer/artificer-1.0.0.Beta1.zip

Docs: Index of /artificer/1.0.0.Beta1

Souce: Release artificer-1.0.0.Beta1 · ArtificerRepo/artificer · GitHub

Docker: (coming soon)