Shibboleth MDA roadmap

[Ian Young]

Dear colleagues,

The most recent release of the Shibboleth Metadata Aggregator was a
little over two years ago, in November 2013. Since that time, many
changes and improvements have been made to the package and it has
become an essential part of several large-scale production
deployments.

After discussion with the Shibboleth Consortium Board, and hearing
input on the importance of this work from the members through their
representatives, the project team has concluded that it is therefore
time to formally release the work that has been done in the last
couple of years, and to prepare for the release of a 1.0 release that
we can officially support.

The roadmap for the Shibboleth MDA is currently as follows:

* v0.9.0 will be a new stable pre-release incorporating the work done
since v0.8.0 to date along with a small number of additional features.
You can see a description of the currently implemented changes, some
of which are substantial, here:

https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/MA1/ReleaseNotes

Note that, as a pre-1.0 release, v0.9 includes several changes to the
framework API, and changes to your existing bean configurations will
be required to migrate to it.

As v0.9.0 will be principally a packaging exercise of work already
done, we expect this to be available during December 2015.

* v0.10.0 is anticipated towards the end of 1Q2016, or the beginning of
2Q2016. This will incorporate contributed code from the UK
federation's ukf-mda project, as well as other appropriate changes.
Additional API changes may be included at this stage, but this is
intended to stabilise the API prior to a 1.0 release.

* v1.0.0 is expected to be released in late 2Q2016 or early 3Q2016. This
may include additional contributed code and other features, but is
principally intended to be a fully supported and stable release of the
technology for all users. We do not expect major API changes from
v0.9.0, but can not rule them out.

Note that our previous roadmap for v1.0.0 of the MDA product included
a web service component. This is no longer part of the specification
for v1.0.0, although using the MDA framework inside web service code
is of course relatively straightforward. For unsupported code
implementing the draft metadata query protocol using the Shibboleth
MDA, you may refer to this independent project:

https://github.com/iay/mdq-server

We will consider the reintroduction of this feature set in future
post-v1.0.0 releases of the Shibboleth MDA.

   -- Ian Young, lead developer, Shibboleth MDA

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