Kuali Rice 2.4.0-M5-SNAPSHOT Release Notes

This version of Rice is a patch release consisting of bug fixes and small items needed by Kuali application partners. There are no database changes and it should be a drop-in replacement.

Kuali Rice 2.4.0-M5-SNAPSHOT can be downloaded from the Rice website at http://kuali.org/rice/download.

There are three different distributions of Rice available: source, binary and server. Please read the Installation Guide for more details on each of these distributions.

Applications can also consume Rice from the maven site at http://search.maven.org/#search|ga|1|org.kuali.rice.

API Documentation can be found at http://site.kuali.org/rice/2.4.0-M5-SNAPSHOT/apidocs/index.html

Formal documentation can be found at http://site.kuali.org/rice/2.4.0-M5-SNAPSHOT/reference/html/index.html. This documentation is still in the process of review and update which will continue through subsequent releases, so please follow the notes in each document to report any outdated information.

If you encounter any difficulty, please don't hesitate to contact the Rice team on our public collaboration mailing list at <rice.collab@kuali.org>. Please indicate that you are using the 2.4.0-M5-SNAPSHOT version of Rice.

One of the major deliverables for version 2.4.0-M5-SNAPSHOT of Kuali Rice was support for the Java Persistence API (JPA) and conversion away from the legacy OJB framework for object-relational mapping within Kuali. This goal has been accomplished with this release of Kuali Rice.

The specific implementation of JPA being used is the JPA 2.1 reference implementation of EclipseLink (http://www.eclipselink.org), version 2.5.1.

As part of this effort, a number of changes were made to Kuali Rice itself:

A guide is provided which details how to convert from OJB to JPA within the KNS to KRAD conversion guide.

The krad-data module is a new module of KRAD which provides a set of APIs for working with data and metadata.

This module was created to help facilitate the conversion to JPA within Kuali Rice and allows for Kuali Rice modules to leverage this API for data operations without having to hard-code the use of JPA APIs throughout the code base. It also allows the rest of the frameworks within KRAD to use this API and insulate themselves from the details of the underlying persistence implementation. This ultimately gives the product more flexibility moving forward. In fact, the krad-data module is intended to provide the capability to support other data and persistence technologies in the future.

More information about the design of this module (as well as the specifics of its JPA implementation) can be found in the KRAD Data Layer Design documents, as well as the "Data Objects" documentation within the KRAD Guide.

It is important to note that efforts have been made to keep the Kuali Nervous System (KNS) with OJB support backward compatible in Rice 2.4. A legacy adapter layer was put into place as part of the integration of the krad-data module back into the rest of KRAD and this is intended to make decisions on whether to use the old OJB-based persistence layer or the new JPA-based implementation depending on various pieces of contextual information. Specifics on how this works can be found in the aforementioned KRAD Data Layer Design documents.