[jdom-interest] Announcing JDOM b10-rc1

[Jason Hunter]

Good news!

After today's work I'm proud to report there are NO known API changes 
required before our 1.0 release.  What we have now is my best effort at 
a 1.0 release API.

We may still have bugs or inconsistencies, but the TODO is wiped clean 
of everything I personally deem important enough to stand in the way of 
a long, long, long awaited 1.0 release.

My goal is to get us to a 1.0 release in the next 6 weeks.  Here's my plan.

I've posted on jdom.org a Beta10 Release Candidate #1.  It's built from 
the very latest CVS source.  You can get it at 
http://jdom.org/dist/source/jdom-b10-rc1.zip.

I'd like people who are using b9 to download this and see how things 
work.  Please double check everything's still prim and proper and 
performant.  The code passes all the jdom-test cases, but they don't 
have great coverage (although they did help me find a bug earlier 
tonight).  Subclassers: I'm especially interested in hearing your 
feedback since we restricted a lot of visibilities.

Then I'd like people who've been involved in the API design to 
thoroughly scour the new Javadocs (online also at 
http://jdom.org/docs/apidocs/).  Do all the new structures make sense? 
Is everything consistent?

Once we're satisfied this b10-rc1 code and interface is correct (in 
perhaps one to two weeks), we'll ship the formal Beta10.  After that, 
we'll get started on the 1.0 Release Candidates.  The first 1.0-rc1 will 
be Beta10 minus the deprecated methods.  (We need to ship 1.0 without 
any deprecations.)  We'll try to spread the word to everyone that 1.0 is 
coming and make sure people test their code against it.  We'll have a 
month to iron out any issues.

Throughout this process, API corrections will be more important than 
code corrections.  I'm happy to ship a 1.0.1 with code fixes, but I want 
the 1.0 API as solid as possible.  We've done a bunch of changes since 
b9, so there's a lot to review.

Sound good?  When we ship 1.0, I'll collect all those beers.  :-)

-jh-