I’ve got a good feeling about this release because unlike a lot of releases I have the feeling that we’re doing more than adding feature and fixing bugs (though we did that too). This release felt like we were paying off technical/hygiene debt at the same time, at least in a small way. Not major refactorings, just lots of small changes to make things better. Some examples are:

• Putting historical information on the download page. It is interesting to browse the history of the project on a single page and it also allowed us to delete a page off the wiki that had similar information.
• Dan added the ability to specify a log4j configuration file on the command-line. This is cool both because it allows people to make changes w/out cracking open the cruisecontrol.jar and because it allows people to use the log4j xml format. The xml format offers some options that aren’t available using the properties format so we’ve opened up another bag of tricks for our users.
• We updated to a new version of Jetty and at the same time we’ve exposed the Jetty configuration files. Like with log4j this opens up a lot of new opportunities for people to add behavior.
• The documentation is now served by Jetty. Till now our help files were there but not served but the webserver — you had to go to the public website instead. <slaps own forehead>
• The documentation for distributed usage is now available on the website. We’ve had support for distributed builds for three years but almost nobody knows about it.
• New css for the jsp reporting application. I can’t believe how dated those pages looked. I can’t believe it was so easy to change. I can’t believe we waited so long to do it. (Now to update the screenshot in the documentation…)

At the same time we’ve made these changes we’ve also laid the foundation for larger technical changes by upgrading our version of Java (to Java5), the JSP (2.1) and Servlet (2.5) APIs.

Good things happening, good things to come!