Cross posted from our blog.

Today we've released ModeShape 3.5.0.Final, with just over a dozen issues fixed, including a couple bigger ones:

• The technology-preview JCR Access Control List (ACL) feature introduced in 3.4 unfortunately caused extra work to be done in repositories that never used ACLs. This release fixes this by adding an optimization that skips ACL checks until the first ACL is created in a repository. From that point on, ACL checking is always performed when accessing or modifying content. Be advised that if you're using this feature in 3.4 and upgrade to 3.5, you may need to create (and save) at least one ACL in the repository before ACL checking is enabled. (You can always remove and save that ACL if it's not really needed.) It's not ideal, but was the only effective way to handle the upgrade.
• Monitor repositories through JMX.
• A new "simple" reference property type that is very similar to JCR's standard weak references that do not enforce referential integrity. When a weak reference points to a node, you can use the "Node.getWeakReferences()" method to find all weak reference properties that point to it. These are called "back references" (since they point back to the referrer), and they can be expensive to maintain when a single node is referenced by lots of other nodes. Simple references are one-way and therefore do not maintain these back references, and thus are faster, more efficient, and more scalable.
• Fixes for two workspace clone bugs, one workspace delete bug, and one merge bug.
• Connectors now can optionally choose to use a simpler, non-I18n logger. (The more rigorous I18n logger is still available.)
• Several other bug fixes.

See our release notes for detail on all the changes in this release.

ModeShape and EAP

As with 3.3.0.Final and 3.4.0.Final, this release works atop EAP 6.1.0.GA. And we have quickstarts that show how easy it is to use ModeShape when deployed this way (you can also download them from our downloads page). See this discussion post for background on what deploying on top of EAP means for community users.

Should you upgrade?

We think so. This release is more stable than any prior 3.x release, so we recommend upgrading as soon as possible. For most of you, upgrading should involve just using the newer JARs. If you're still running ModeShape on AS7, though, you'll want to look at using EAP 6.1 as mentioned above; it's more stable and it's version of Infinispan has lots of fixes (especially around clustering).

Get the release

The artifacts are in the JBoss Maven repository (and hopefully will roll out to Maven Central soon) and on our downloads page. Our getting started guide has instructions, ModeShape 3 documentation and JavaDoc are available, and our code is on GitHub. Join us on our forums or IRC channel to ask questions, and please log any issues in our JIRA.

Once again, we had a lot of help this release from our community members that reported, fixed issues, and contributed fixes and features! Thanks to the whole community for a job well-done!