Acceleo graduation, version jumping and maintenance

Quite a few monthes ago I talked about the history of Acceleo and why its version number were regressing. Well let's talk about version jumping now :p.

Acceleo is a code generator with its own history and user community ; over the years, it grew from its first stable release to its current 2.6 version. Yet, we (the Acceleo dev team) thought that the future of code generation lied in the OMG standard "MOF Model To Text Language" (MTL) based on OCL.

An important change with this version is its switch from a self-hosted project to an eclipse foundation project. Following Eclipse rules, the project "Acceleo" was required to have an incubation phase, and this incubation called for version numbers 0.*. Started a little more than two years ago, this incubation phase is almost ready for its end.

We plan to have Acceleo graduate along with the Helios (Eclipse 3.6) release which is due to be out on June 2010. This usually means the plugin grows from version 0.9 to version 1.0. However, in order not to unsettle the existing adopter community and stay coherent with Acceleo version history, we plan to have Acceleo jump from version 0.9 (its last incubation version within Eclipse) to version 3.0 (as the last stable release of Acceleo out of Eclipse was 2.6).

At first, we planned to implement the version jump after the official release review in June 2010 ; yet to avoid unneeded unstability and after double-checking with the Eclipse management organization, we did this change before the last "pre-release candidate" milestone. With this latest build, Acceleo then jumps from '0.9.0M5' to '3.0.0M6'.

Take good note that this version jam is for those of you who plan to give (or were already giving) the new Acceleo a try. Acceleo 3.0 already sports awesome stability and a level of functionality close to if not equal to its 2.x stream to which you might be accustomed. As for this maintenance stream, we have a corrective version incoming and a 2.7 version will be out any week now.