5.5 will remain JDK5 complaint. 6.0
will move to JDK6.
We will provide migration scripts from 5.x.
Mark
On 04/07/2012 04:32, Mark Proctor wrote:
http://blog.athico.com/2012/07/drools-55-60-and-future.html
--- copied from blog article ---
Some time soon we will branch
master. The current master will be branched to 5.5 and then
master will become 6.0.
We will develop 5.5 and 6.0 in parallel. In general we will
try to apply as many bug fixes and stable features to both
branches, for as long as it's practically possible. At some
point 6.0 will diverge too much and the cost will become too
high.
I hope we can release a 5.5 within the next 4-5 months; this
may very depending on the impact of other commitments.
6.0 will be a longer term effort, and will involve the most
drastic changes at both the engine and language level to date.
The engine algorithm will be almost completely new, and will
no longer be considered a Rete implementation. Instead it will
be a lazy collection oriented matching algorithm, that will
support adaptive network topologies. First we'll deliver the
lazy matching algorithm and then shift to collection oriented.
The adaptive network topologies will take more time and may
deliver after 6.0. These engine changes will lay the ground
work for exploiting multi-cpu architectures, and durable
backing stores (Active Databases). I also hope we can
integrate our engine with a tableaux algorithm, to provide
seamless description logic capabilities for semantic
ontologies; but that's still a very open research area, with
many unknowns.
6.0 will most likely retain api comparability (no current
plans to break it), however the DRL syntax will be broken. DRL
has been backwards compatible, excluding bugs and regressions,
for almost 7 years now. We plan to take this opportunity to
revamp DRL, as we fully embrace becoming a hybrid reasoning
engine. We will fully explore passive, reactive, relational
and functional programming styles. The hope is we can create a
declarative language system, more flexible and more suitable
for a wider range of solutions. I also really want to address
some of the usability problems associated with rule execution
control, particularly around salience and the various rule
groups (agenda-groups, ruleflow-groups, activation-groups).
Relative salience and a single concept around a flexible
RuleModule will hopefully make this possible. We have to start
making things easier, simpler and more consistent.
We are just starting to flesh out our designs, figuring out
what works and what doesn't. All are at the very early stages,
much has not yet been added, and everything is open to debate.
General rule syntax
The event sequencing draft can
be found here:
The functional programming
aspects are still being explored on this wiki page:
We will eventually roll the
later two back in the Drools60 document, to provide a single
document that covers the 6.0 language specific.
The web based tooling is also
under going a revamp. It will offer a more flexible workbench
like experience where all panels are plugins, with support for
perspectives. This will allow us to build a consistent and
unified approach to our web tooling efforts across
Drools&jBPM. We also have a mechanism now that will allow
our web based components, such as decision tables and guided
editors to be used in Eclipse – to create a consistent
experience between the two environments. We have back ported
the java7 vfs api and have a Git implementation for this, we
will also continue provide a JCR implementation. So far Git is
looking extremely scalable and easy to use. JGit provides a
full java implementation, making out of the box use easy. Stay
tuned for more news. Hopefully in less then 2 months we will
have some early proof of concepts to show, for the web based
efforts.
If you want to help make
history happen, joins us on irc (real time chat). You can also
leave comments on the wiki pages or the mailing lists
(developer list).
Here goes nothing!!!
Mark