[seam-dev] Seam 3.1 beta release, take two

[Shane Bryzak]

Guys and girls,

In the interest of moving things forward, I'm going to shortly start 
working on the beta 2 release.  There are still some issues that we're 
working through with the multi-container testsuite configuration, 
however with some help I've been able to resurrect the existing tests in 
Solder to run in the latest version of Arquillian and I'm confident that 
I can get the tests in the other modules passing successfully without 
too much trouble.  I would still like us to press on with the test suite 
work, however I don't want it to hold up the release schedule.

Since the Beta1 release there have been a couple of important changes, 
which I'll quickly summarise here:

1) seam-parent is now at the top of the food chain and no longer 
inherits its configuration from weld-parent.  This change is good for a 
couple of reasons, first of all the disassociation from the Weld project 
will help to reinforce that Seam is CDI implementation-independent.  
Secondly it gives us total control over configuration for the Maven 
plugins that we use, allowing us to update the plugin versions (which 
I've already done, to the latest version of each plugin) and fine tune 
the plugin configuration parameters for Seam.

2) I've decided against moving the logging feature out of Solder and 
into its own module for now, as I discovered that it was too tightly 
coupled to Solder to "de-tangle" it easily.  I have however refactored 
the logging API classes into their own package, org.jboss.seam.logging 
which I think will be more intuitive for our users.  I believe that the 
Solder reference documentation still needs to be updated in response to 
the changes made for SOLDER-102 
(http://issues.jboss.org/browse/SOLDER-102) - Ken, could you please 
confirm?  If so, would you be willing to update the reference docs to 
reflect the logging changes?

I am aiming for the Beta2 release this coming weekend, which means with 
our 20+ modules now I need to get started pretty soon.  If anyone has 
any spare cycles and is able to help out with this, it would be greatly 
appreciated.  Each module needs to have its tests fixed, logging 
refactored to use the new logging API package, and its distribution 
thoroughly checked for correctness/completeness.  If you'd like to 
volunteer for a module or two, please catch me on IRC and we can work it 
out there.

Thanks,
Shane