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