After a long and intense development effort, and with a lot of help from our very active community, we proudly announce the release of openArchitectureWare 4.3.1. Numerous bug fixes and improvements, but also a few new features have been put into this release.

The release can be obtained at:

http://www.openarchitectureware.org/pub/downloads/dist/oaw4.3.1/org.openarchitectureware.sdk.feature-4.3.1.20081222-1600PRD.zip

A P2 update site is available at:

http://www.openarchitectureware.org/updatesite/milestone/site.xml

Also, there is a classic update site at:

http://www.openarchitectureware.org/updatesite/milestone/4.3.1/classic/site.xml

In addition to bugfiles, the openArchitectureWare 4.3.1 release contains the following major improvements:

• Reviewed and extended reference manual
  
  
• Integration with the Graphviz visualization toolkit
  
  
• Utility that transforms Ecore metamodels into Graphviz diagrams. This component also demonstrates the use of the Graphviz integration.
  
  
• Refactoring support for Xpand and Xtend. Avalailable as a separate download at:
  http://www.openarchitectureware.org/pub/downloads/dist/oaw4.3.1/org.openarchitectureware.refactoring.feature-4.3.1.20081222-1600PRD.zip
  PLEASE NOTE: This is still an experimental feature. Therefore, the oAW team does not provide any support for this component.
  
  
• XSD Adapter: oAW 4.3.1 is the first release of oAW which officially includes the XSD Adapter, a software component which allows oAW to transparently use XML Schemas (XSD) as meta models and read/write XML files as models. For example, the transformation of one XML format to another can now be implemented as a model-to-model transformation using Xtend. For a quick start, it is recommended to try out the examples, which are available via "File" -> "New" ->Example..." -> "openArchitectureWare Examples using an XSD Meta Model". In the future, up-to-date information will be available at
  
  http://www.openarchitectureware.org/staticpages/index.php/xsd_adapter
  
  In case you are already using the XSD Adapter for your own projects, make sure to check out this website, since it announces some small but important changes which might have an impact on your projects.
  
  
• Xtext: We now allow URIs pointing to other models to be classpath relative, which is a well-established method to access resources uniformly from within a workspace, an Eclipse plug-in or a standalone Java application. The URI resolution happens inside a special XtextResourceSet. As the classpath can be different for each project, each editor instance now manages its own XtextResourceSet.
  
  To provide the classpath context, we had to change the signature of
  
  org::openarchitectureware::xtext::registry::Modelloader::load
  to
  load(String uri, EObject contextElement)
  
  where the resource set for the new resource is the resource set the context element is stored in. If you are using cross-references to other models, you have to regenerate existing Xtext artifacts.
  
  A further extension
  
  load(String uri, EObject contextElement, boolean forceLinking)
  
  allows you to switch off linking of the loaded resource. This is used by the editor to avoid recursive loading of cross-referenced resources. Note that a resource loaded without linking will not have any cross-references set.
  
  
• The Xpand/Xtend editor now has full support for arrays and generic collections. This is especially useful when working with JavaBeans based models, since it makes a lot of typecasts unnecessary.

We would like to thank all our contributors who have put a lot of effort into testing, reporting problems, and submitting patches. Without them, the release would not have the quality level that it has now!

Happy modeling!