We've just released our second beta for 2.5, with the following changes:

• improved performance for versioning-related operations;
• upgrade to Lucene 3.1;
• eliminated our dependency on the JCIP and Google Collections libraries; and
• fixed about 20 bugs

This release follows our Beta1 release three weeks ago with:

• improved performance of imports, saves, and startup;
• added a new pluggable facility to extract searchable text from binary content, with out-of-the-box support for Teiid Virtual Database, Microsoft Office, PDF, HTML, plain text, and XML files;
• made it easier to use anonymous authentication;
• made it easier to use HTTP servlet authentication in web applications;
• added several smaller features;
• introduced a profiling mechanism that uses Byteman runtime bytecode injection;
• fixed over 2 dozen bugs;
• switched to Maven 3 and are now buildable with MEAD/BREW; and
• switched to Git and GitHub

This release is available in the JBoss Maven repository (under the "org.modeshape" group ID) and our downloads page. We’ve updated our Getting Started Guide, Reference Guide, and JavaDoc. And as always, check out our release notes for more information about what’s exactly in this beta release, including all the fixed issues. Give this release a spin, and let us know what you think!

We’re currently planning to release one more beta in about 3-4 weeks followed by a final release about 2 weeks later.

Thank you to all the ModeShape developers and users, who are doing a fantastic job of putting ModeShape through its paces and reporting any issues. Lately we've had a lot more users that have offered fixes for issues and have become contributors. That's fantastic, and I suspect mostly because moving to GitHub has made this significantly easier for people to do. Keep up the great work, folks!!

Best regards,

Randall