Release date: November 1, 2016
We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 4.7.0.
Resources
Team
Release Manager
- Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
Developers
Aaron Birkland, Johns Hopkins University
Unknown User (acoburn), Amherst College
- Andrew Woods, DuraSpace
- Esme Cowles, Princeton University
- Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
- Joshua Westgard, University of Maryland
- Kevin Ford, Art Institute of Chicago
- Longshou Situ, University of California, San Diego
- Michael Durbin, University of Virginia
- Yinlin Chen, Virginia Tech
Issue Reporters
- Andrew Woods
- Bethany Seeger
- Esmé Cowles
- Jared Whiklo
- Jim Coble
- Joshua Westgard
- Justin Coyne
- Matthew Hanlon
- Peter Eichman
Summary
The Fedora 4.7.0 release furthers several major objectives:
- Upgrade to Modeshape 5.0.0 Final
- Tighten the definition of the RESTful application programming interface (API)
- Replace legacy transform service with more powerful LDPath service
- Fix bugs
This release is the first release built against a version of Modeshape that does NOT use Infinispan for data storage.
This release is a major release (i.e. 4.7.0 instead of 4.6.1) because of the upgrade in an underlying application, Modeshape 5. This requires a backend data upgrade. See the "ModeShape 5 Upgrade" section below for details.
The deprecated filesystem federation connector has been moved from the core codebase into a separate module.
Changes
ModeShape 5 Upgrade
This release represents a significant change to Fedora's underlying persistence implementation. The ModeShape application over which the Fedora implementation is built has seen a major upgrade. As a part of that upgrade, the object persistence layer has changed from using a product called Infinispan to native, pluggable, support for storage backends including JDBC stores such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.
Although this simplifies the application architecture, it does require a backend data upgrade from previous Fedora 4.x versions to 4.7.0. The upgrade process involves performing a backup of your existing Fedora, followed by a restore into your new 4.7.0 Fedora.
Before performing a backup of your 4.x repository, you must first upgrade to the Fedora 4.6.1 patch release. Fedora 4.6.1 includes a patch to the underlying ModeShape that generates backups suitable for restore to Fedora 4.7.0.
Service Modularity
In an on-going effort to decouple non-core features from the core codebase, two features have been refactored.
Transform
The extension module fcrepo-transform is not included in the 4.7.0 release of Fedora. This module was used to transform RDF resources into JSON using programs based on LDPath. The functionality provided by fcrepo-transform is now available in the fcrepo-ldpath component of the fcrepo-camel-toolbox project.
More information about using the fcrepo-ldpath component is available in the project README.
Additional information about LDPath can be found on the Marmotta website.
File System Connector
This release extracts the file system connector functionality out as an optional, extension module in a similar fashion to the audit and authorization features. Although the file system connector feature is available in the "webapp plus" deployable artifact, its use should be considered with caution, as the feature will likely be removed in the future.
Application Programming Interface
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Documentation
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HTML Interface
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Housekeeping and Bugfixes
Numerous refactorings, bugfixes, and clean-up tasks were addressed in this release:
