Planned updates to Impala in the near term

I am planning to do some overdue work on Impala in the short term to bring it up to date. The next release I am planning to do will be version 1.1. It will essentially be a maintenance release.

Apart from a couple of minor features still to be determined, the main focus will be on getting Impala working nicely with Spring 3.1 and Spring 3.2.

Right now, Impala won't run Spring 3.1 because of changes to the ApplicationContext interface, which introduced a getEnvironment() method. The changes to Impala to support this are very small, and will be made in this release. I also plan to use Spring 3.2 as the compile version.

I also intend to introduce changes to make it easier to add module-specific resources to a running application, which can be useful in providing on-the-fly template fixes in production.

Apart from this, I also intend to slim down the project significantly:

• removing features that are no longer necessary, have been superseded, or are no longer supported.
• removing old examples projects that I no longer intend to maintain.

I am also planning to all projects relating to OSGi support in Impala. As some will know, I experimented with introducing OSGi support to Impala, with some success. However, I also reached the conclusion it would take a great deal of work to make OSGi really usable in an Impala environment, work which I was certainly not interested in committing to. I'm quite happy to maintain Impala's status as a simpler alternative to OSGi, rather than a project which is designed to support OSGi directly.