The latest and greatest of Firebase incarnations is now official. Firebase 1.6.0 was released today after nearly four months of development.
This release contains the following functional highlights:
- Prepared transactions. Each event transaction is now lazily bound to a JDBC data source or a JPA entity manager. These prepared objects is unique per event, and will be committed or rolled back automatically when the event is handled.
- Service transactions. Given the new and improved internal transaction stack, event driven services can now be configured to use JTA.
- Server SSL support. The Firebase server now supports SSL certificates in Java Key Store or PKCS#12 formats for client connections.
- Activator routing. It is now possible to send events to and from activators within a Firebase installation. This gives games, services and tournaments an option to interact with the activators which was previously not possible.
But under the hood, there are more improvements. We have switched to use the Bitronix JTA provider, making JTA a very attractive feature once more, the lobby has seen several bug fixes and improvements, we have a completely new internal transaction stack resulting in better performance and, hopefully, better extendability, we have significant speed improvements and much more.
Firebase 1.6.0 also marks a transition in target Java platform. So far Firebase has been exclusively targeted towards the Java 5 platform, from this release and onwards we will concentrate more on Java 6.