Across 5.3.0 Release notes

The one big change in 5.3 is that Across development has moved to an internal GitLab server, with the repositories also mirrored (publicly) to GitHub.

The Across modules have been reorganized into a much smaller number of git repositories, to speed up the release process. As a result of this, there are a few small changes you need in your application.

Git repositories

From now on, you can find the Across repositories at:

• https://gitlab.isaac.nl/antwerpen/across/ (internal-only, for development)
• https://github.com/ForeachOS (public mirror, this is also in the SCM section of the pom.xml files).

The GitHub sync is live: it happens on every commit.

The number of repositories has been drastically reduced, because it took way too much time to release each of these individual repositories (almost two days for Across 5.2.1, even using the (internal-only) Across Release Tool).

The following repositories still exists as before:

• across-framework (renamed from just across)
• across-autoconfigure
• across-platform

All of the standard modules have been merged into four repositories:

• across-base-modules: Low-level modules needed in pretty much every Across application:

    across-hibernate-module
    spring-security-module
    debug-web-module
    ehcache-module
    logging-module
  

• across-entity-admin-modules: Closely related modules, centered around the Across “crown-jewel” entity-module:

    ax-bootstrap-4-utilities
    ax-bootstrap-theme
    bootstrap-ui-module
    admin-web-module
    entity-module
    application-info-module
    properties-module
  

• across-user-auth-modules: Centered around the user-module and additional authentication modules:

    spring-security-acl-module
    user-module
    ldap-module
    oauth2-module
  

• across-media-modules: Media such as file/blob repositories (Amazon S3, SFTP server, …) and images, and the Web CMS:

    file-manager-module
    imageserver-client
    imageserver-core
    imageserver-admin
    web-cms-module
  

Note that in the merged repositories, the history of all files has been preserved: all modules were merged using --allow-unrelated-histories.

The new release build script that comes with this can publish an entire Across Framework + Standard modules + Platform release in less than two hours. This order of magnitude improvement is key to make it easier to upgrade Across in the future.

Compatibility notes

Virtually no changes

It is important to stress that 5.3.0 is essentially the same as 5.2.2.RELEASE. The main purpose of this release is to test out the new Git repositories layout and the new release build script.

Version number changes

We have dropped the .RELEASE suffix from the version numbers and switched to Semantic Versioning. This lines up with Spring Framework and Spring Boot, who also dropped this OSGI-style versioning in 5.3 and 2.4 respectively.

You’ll need to be aware of this when adapting your application pom.xml files: remember to remove the .RELEASE suffix as well.

The versions of all modules in the same repository have the same version number now: after all, Git tags are per repository as well. This gives:

across-framework:            5.3.0
across-autoconfigure:        2.3.0
across-base-modules:         4.3.0
across-entity-admin-modules: 4.3.0
across-user-auth-modules:    4.3.0
across-media-modules:        6.3.0
across-platform:             5.3.0

BTW, another reason that some modules clearly belonged together, could be seen in the version number: closely related modules often had the same version numbers anyway.

It’s important to state again: even if you see a big bump in a module version, nothing has actually changed! FYI, the biggest version bumps are:

• ax-bootstrap-theme from 0.0.1 to 4.3.0.
• webcms-module from 0.3.1 to 6.3.0.

Liquibase upgraded from 4.9.1 to 4.17.0

The GitLab CI/CD runners on Amazon were consistently failing because of concurrency issues. To fix this, we needed the use new ThreadLocalScopeManager introduced in this Liquibase PR.

Image Server

The Maven groupId for the ImageServer modules has been changed from com.foreach.imageserver to com.foreach.across.modules:

• A simple search&replace for those groupIds through your pom.xml should be sufficient to quickly and safely migrate. The Maven artifactIds are still the same.

• The Java package names have not been modified, and still start with com.foreach.imageserver, so there’s nothing to change in your code.

Removed modules

The following modules have been removed from across-platform:

• spring-batch-module (latest release: 2.2.1.RELEASE): Only used in some legacy microservices: PDF generator, which will be replaced with an entirely different and much simpler implementation.

• spring-mobile-module (latest release: 3.2.1.RELEASE) : Spring Mobile itself is end-of-life: https://spring.io/projects/spring-mobile

The previous releases of those modules will most likely continue to work with this version of across-platform. You will have to manually configure the version of those modules, most likely in your top-level parent pom.xml file.

Reproducible builds

Some minimal effort has been done to make the Across builds reproducible:

• This is needed for a secure software supply chain.

• But most importantly right now: this makes it far easier to diff and diffoscope on the build outputs while I was changing the build procedure.

For more info about reproducible builds and why they are important for security, see:

• https://reproducible-builds.org/
• https://slsa.dev/
• https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-reproducible-builds.html
• https://diffoscope.org/

Thanks

Big thanks to:

• the iO Eindhoven team for setting us up on their GitLab server.

• Arno for testing a snapshot build with a client application.