Dec 10th 2011 - DataNucleus Access Platform 3.0.4 ("Newton") is released. DataNucleus Access Platform provides persistence and retrieval of Java objects to/from a wide range of datastores including RDBMS, db4o, LDAP, XML, and Excel. Version 3.0.4 includes the following changes over 3.0.3

• AccessPlatform : drop support for ZIP distributions for db4o and NeoDatis datastores
• AccessPlatform : add Maven POM artifacts for main AccessPlatform combinations (JDO-RDBMS, JPA-RDBMS, etc)
• Add ability to turn off Metadata support for XML or annotations, for performance
• Parameterise all persistence property names for easy referencing
• Split support for java.awt geometry types into a separate plugin, and complete support for persisting in String form
• Improve startup process so that NucleusContext, PluginManager are more modular, and so that JPA doesn't create multiple working contexts
• SchemaTool : improvement to class resolution process when not forking the JVM process
• Support for Atomikos transaction manager (Matthew Adams)
• Support batching of L2 cache updates
• Support L2 cache "mode" to determine which classes are cacheable (JPA "sharedCache.Mode")
• RDBMS : Improvement to handling of result classes when single column selected
• RDBMS : Support for embedded inherited objects (likely part of JDO3.1/3.2)
• MongoDB : fix to handling of bidirectional relations when using IDENTITY strategy
• HBase : fix problem in table management
• Cache : support for javax.cache v0.3+ (in datanucleus-cache v3.1.0, while support for the earlier version is in datanucleus-cache v3.0)
• Eclipse : update to the plugin to move API to general preferences and drop the enhancer "type" since it was not being used

This release is downloadable under an Apache 2 license from the DataNucleus community site.