Before we implement new features (which we plan for Q3), the ProjectForge-Team wants to make a technical release at the end of Q2 2016.

For a new major release we are currently working on the internals of ProjectForge.

• Update from Hibernate 3 to Hibernate 5
• Update Hibernate Search
• Using Micromata Genome Commons for JPA
  • Transaction handling
  • Hibernate Search adapter
  • JPA Metadata
• Using JPA-Stack for new features
• Upgrade to Spring 4.2.3 and Spring Boot
  • Using Spring Annotations
• Many other libraries are updated.

• Plugins
  • Plugins are now in separate projects and can be loaded dynamically
  • Plugin-API revised to allow discovering Plugins dynamically.
  • Administration mask to activate / deactivate Plugins.

• Refactoring and Cleanups
  • Reduce internal cyclic dependencies
  • Cleanup Maven structure

• Configuration
  • Configuration framework with properties files

• Lean application
  • ProjectForge runs as standalone application.
  • Using Spring Boot as application framework with Jetty

• More flexible Schema for entities
  • To enable extensions to entities, we implemented attributes and time able attributes, which can be attached to an entity, like Employee or Address.
  • The attributes schema for an entity can be declared in a xml file, so each installation of ProjectForge can extend the entities with own data.
  • For edit pages a generic control renders input fields for the attributes
  • time able attributes can be used to declare entity values for a given time range. For example the employee may get a raise of the salary on a given date. With time able attributes the salary for now and the future can be stored.