Impala 1.0M6 includes a full reworking of the Impala service registry implementation, as well as the mechanisms for exporting services to and importing services from the service registry.

The headline improvements include the following.

• Configuration of Impala services is now much simpler, as a new Spring service namespace has been provided for easily exporting and importing services.
• Service export and import can now be done not only by name but also by type or by custom attributes, the latter using a model similar to that used in OSGi.
• Impala's mechanism for proxying services obtained from the service registry has improved, and is now more easily configurable.
• It is now possible to export and import Impala services without having to specify an interface - proxying of the service implementation class is now also supported.
• Impala now supports exporting and importing services based on Spring beans which are not singletons or not created using non-singleton Factory beans. It does this in a way that is totally transparent to users of the services, effectively allowing clients to treat all beans as singletons.
• Impala now provides dynamic java.util.List and java.util.Map implementations, backed by beans imported from the service registry.

For more details on how to import from and export to the service registry, see ImportingAndExportingServices.

The 1.0M6 release also introduces a number of improvements to make dynamic module reloading more robust, particularly when using the module auto-reload feature.

See the full list of issues covered for milestone 1.0M6.

If you are upgrading from an earlier release, you will probably wish to check the backward incompatible changes for 1.0M6. Also, take a look at the migration to 1.0M6 page.

If you like Impala and would like to support the project, please take a look at this page: http://code.google.com/p/impala/wiki/GetInvolved.