Besides some new functional features, one main issue of the 3.0 release is the renaming of COPPER’s toplevel package to org.copperengine.

To make migration of existing applications easy, persistent workflow instances and responses in existing databases keep compatible due to a loadtime adaptation feature - see StandardJavaSerializer.classnameReplacement

A complete overview of what’s new in release 3.0 is available in our git repo at WHATSNEW.txt

Java 8 is just around the corner and you might wonder if COPPER is ready for Java 8, especially the new language features.

Alas, no! The reason is that we are using the awesome ASM bytecode engineering library to load, modify and store workflow classes from and into the database. The current stable release is 4.2, which is not ready for Java 8 yet.

However, the ASM developers are already working on Java8 compatibility and promise that it’s ready with the next major release 5.0. A beta version is already available, which we are testing right now.

Thus, in short: you cannot use Java8 with COPPER right now. If you really want to use COPPER with Java 8, you can do so, but be very careful to compile all your persistent workflow classes with --source 1.7 --target 1.7. (All your other classes can be compiled without these options.) But that’s probably not what you want, because you cannot use the new language features in your workflows, especially closures.

We will release a new COPPER version with Java 8 support as soon as ASM 5.0-stable hits the scene, so stay tuned!

We moved the source code from Google Code to GitHub: Now it’s here: https://github.com/copper-engine/copper-engine

Google Code served us well one year now, but we found that GitHub has some very attractive features: better issue and release management, free webspace (GitHub pages), a nicer wiki. Plus, of course, the first-class support for Git, the new version control behemoth we all love.

So, we removed all content from the old Google code site and moved it to GitHub. The new issue tracker is here, and all documentation went to our new website.

Please let us know if anything is missing! E-mail to contact@copper-engine.org.

As you can see, we completely revamped our copper-engine.org website. :) Take a look around!

The site is now made with pure Bootstrap 3.0 and is served by the Jekyll templating engine on GitHub pages (more on GitHub in our next post).

Not everything is quite there yet, documentation is still lacking, but we’re working on it! We’ll post it here whenever we make some new content available.

Stay tuned!

COPPER 2.4.3 is the latest stable release. Here’ what’s new:

• New feature: engine.run throws DuplicateIdException if an existing workflow instance id is used - this is also implemented for the transient engine which substitutes throwing an IllegalStateException
• New feature: Default value for property “loadNonWorkflowClasses” in “FileBasedWorkflowRepository” changed from false to true, due to various problems, e.g. Switch-case not working out-of-the-box
• Bugfix: ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException and other exceptions during workflow instrumentation when extensively using nested blocks and local variables

You can get it here: https://github.com/copper-engine/copper-engine/releases/tag/2.4.3