Impala 1.0M4 released

I am pleased to announce the release of Impala 1.0M4, with preliminary support for OSGi.

Impala 1.0M4 now includes the ability to arrange Impala modules and their corresponding class loaders in a graph, instead of in a hierarchy as in previous releases. This feature offers application developers much more flexibility in choosing the appropriate module structures for applications.

1.0M4 is the first release of the project to include OSGi support. All Impala jars are now OSGi-compliant bundles. It is now possible to run Impala and its application modules in an OSGi container (currently Eclipse Equinox). Further improvements to Impala's support for OSGi are expected in subsequent releases.

At this stage Impala support for OSGi is still experimental. It is not recommended at this stage to use it in a production environment.

Impala promises to become the first and only project to offer a seamless transition to (and from) OSGi. There is no intention to make OSGi the default deployment model for Impala. However, OSGi is likely to become a good choice in the future for projects which will benefit from more rigorous management of third-party libraries than is possible using the traditional model.

More information on Impala's position with respect to OSGi can be found in this blog entry: http://impalablog.blogspot.com/2008/12/announcing-osgi-support-in-impala.html

For more information on this release see: http://code.google.com/p/impala/wiki/Release1_0M4Announcement

Phil Zoio

Impala Home: http://impala.googlecode.com