I am pleased to announce the release of Compass 1.2 version. Compass 1.2 is the formal release of version 1.2 and includes many improvements, bug fixes, and performance enhancements over version 1.1. The list of features is very long and includes features listed for 1.2 M1, 1.2 M2, 1.2 M3 and 1.2 RC1. Features included in the 1.2 GA release include (a complete list can be found here):

Null Value

When mapping a property of a class, a null value can be defined on the mappings which will be saved in the index if the actual property value is null. This allows to simply search on properties that has no value.

Improved Property Managed Id

When working with marshaling turned on, Compass will try and create an internal id (if required) in order to unmarshal the object correctly from the index. Now, there is an additional setting which instructs Compass not to create an internal id if all the mappings have store=”no”. The managed id setting can now be set on a specific property, as well as being set on class mappings and globally.

Improved No-Unmarshal Mode

Compass can work in no unmarshal mode there is no need to get the Object constructed back from the index. In this mode Compass does not store additional information in the index and performs the indexing much faster. Now, by calling the appropriate method in order to get an Object back, Compass will return the Object with its ids set. This allows for simpler integration with ORM libraries where loading the object from the database using the ORM tool is needed.

I will post later on the roadmap for Compass (both 1.3 and 2.0)…

Enjoy!

I have been a mac user for a few years now (not for long though, but that is a different blog post) and have installed windows using BootCamp on my MacBook Pro. I am also using the Leopard WWDC build (which I hoped will have Java 6…).

The first thing that I was surprised about was the fact that once you installed windows, it defaults to start up into windows and not OS X. Somebody is going to pay for this in apple :).

The second thing is the fact that since now, by default, windows starts up, I find myself using the shutdown button more often. If I am not fast enough to hit the option button, it starts up into windows, and I press shutdown since I don’t want to wait till windows starts up.

Now for the difference between windows and OS X. If windows detects an improper shutdown, it will tell you next time that there was one in a very scary, text oriented window, and ask you what to do. 99.999% of the time, you will simply tell windows to continue and startup immediately. With OS X, this is not the case. OS X, when it crashes, or when I shut it down because it is stuck (yea, it happens with OS X as well), simply boots back without asking questions.

So, if most of the time people will simply boot into windows in case of an improper shutdown, and, people who wish to boot in safe mode will probably know the key binding to do so, why scare the typical user so much? Personally, I have not seen a difference between OS X and windows in being able to recover from such a shutdown.

So, with very small decisions like this, OS X is perceived to be much more stable than windows. And this manages to fool the best of us. This lesson is one that all of us should follow when developing applications.