JOnAS Releases Life Cycle

The JOnAS release numbering adopt the following rules:

• The first indice corresponds to the J2EE/Java EE version: JOnAS 3.x for J2EE 1.3, JOnAS 4.x for J2EE 1.4, JOnAS 5.x for J2EE 5 (J2EE has finally adopted the JOnAS versioning rules !).
• The second indice corresponds to major enhancements, in term of functionalities or of significant upgrade of embedded components versions. This corresponds to what will be called a "major JOnAS version".
• The third indice corresponds to maintenance releases (bugs fixing).
• A SVN branch will be systematically created when releasing a major version (e.g. the 4.8 branch), and the first tagged version of the branch (so the release version number) will always have the third indice at 1 (e.g. 4.8.1 for branch 4.8, 4.9.1 for branch 4.9, and so on ...)
• The current JOnAS version under development within the trunk will be marked (not tagged) with the third indice at 0 (e.g. 4.10.0 after 4.9.1 has been released).
• In each branch, only bug fixes should be reported.
• For some versions under development, like the 5.0 some time ago, or the 5.1, some milestone releases may be published (M1, M2...), providing a subset of the functions the final release will provide

The releasing process for a major version is described below:

• Any JOnAS version is always firstly released as release candidate, e.g. 4.9.1 (some versions may have been tagged, but not released). After some period (at least a couple of weeks) of beta testing by the community, if no bug is raised, the version is promoted as stable release, else, bugs are fixed and a new version is released (e.g. 4.9.2). No stable release will be issued until any bug with level > 5 is fixed (or a turn around is found).
• After a major version has been released as stable, no more version will be done in the corresponding branch, except some maintenance releases for some specific user requirement.