Casbah 2.3.0-RC1 Released

Today, I published the first Release Candidate of Casbah 2.3.0, available for SBT users as "org.mongodb" % "casbah" % "2.3.0-RC1". My release announcement to implicit.ly contains the details on all of the bugs fixed – I will also be posting another set of blog entries shortly outlining the specific improvements to the code and demoing fetaures.

It has been just about a year since the last major release of Casbah, which was version 2.1.5-1. A number of factors led to the delay in getting a major update out the door, for which I apologize. Amongst other things I have spent much of the last year since Casbah’s prior release on the road doing training, consulting and evangelization of MongoDB to users around the globe; I had less time for code among all these things than I expected! Additionally, after releasing the 2.1.x series of Casbah I embarked on what quickly morphed from Casbah 2.2.0 to 3.0.0 – a major refactoring and cleanup of 2+ years of API cruft and “I’m Gonna Learn Me Some Scala!” detritus. In all the excitement to release a perfect release to end all releases, I did a poor job of making it easy to backport and maintain a compatibility series for 2.x users – a harsh lesson in the importance of creating small, bite sized git commits that can be cherry picked.

So What Happened to Casbah 3.0? And 2.2?

Casbah 2.2.x is dead – 3.0.x is certainly not! When the work following 2.1.x was begun, I had published a number of early snapshots as Casbah 2.2.0-SNAPSHOT. During this development cycle I found a lot of the aforementioned detritus such as overloaded methods (Casbah was begun as a Scala 2.7.x project and I never fully moved its core APIs over to use named and default arguments - some of these are corrected in Casbah 2.3.0 but in the interest of backwards compatibility with prior releases of 2.x, not completely). As I worked on coding improvements around these things the API drifted further and further away from compatibility and I chose to kill off the 2.2.x series, planning the next release of Casbah as 3.0.0. In addition to that, I intended Casbah 3.0.0 to coincide with MongoDB 2.2.0 which will have additional features such as the New Aggregation Framework. As MongoDB 2.2 hasn’t been released yet, it became clear I needed to provide an updated Casbah release with many of the improvements but without many of the API breakages introduced in 3.0 - including a vastly improved build of the Casbah Query DSL which has stronger type safety and compiler checks thanks to the inimitable Jon-Anders Teigen.

Casbah 3.0 is still very much alive and in development, with 2.3.0 representing a backporting of many of the changes and improvements from 3.0. Because of the abandonment of the original 2.2 development series, I felt it was saner to kill 2.2.x dead and bring the backports into a 2.3.x series. You can, if you wish, think of this as Casbah 2.3 - The Search for Casbah 2.2 (The long rumored sequel to Spaceballs has been said to be called Spaceballs 3: The Search for Spaceballs 2).

I will continue to support and improve Casbah 2.3.x moving forward as well as completing Casbah 3.0 (still intended to coincide with the release of MongoDB 2.2). If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Later tonight or tomorrow I will post an entry or two detailing all of the wonderful changes in Casbah 2.3.0 and how to take advantage of them.