Terracotta is releasing version 2.5 this week and along with it, a new site called the Terracotta Forge. The Forge is a place where both Terracotta and the community can manage and release Terracotta-related projects. There are several types of projects on the forge right now: sample programs, Terracotta Integration Modules (TIMs), utility libraries, etc.

The Terracotta Integration Modules are packages of clustering configuration that can be applied to external libraries to turn a single VM library into a clustered version of the same library. Terracotta has a whole slew of these and they are currently managed in the main Terracotta source tree and provided as pre-built modules in the Terracotta download kit.

However, from a release management point of view, this makes it more difficult to update these TIMs off-cycle from the main kit. Terracotta releases new versions relatively frequently (approximately every 3-6 months) but these 3rd party integrations often come out with new versions or have other issues that need to be addressed in the middle of the main release cycles. So, we are beginning to move these TIMs out of our main source tree and into the Forge. That will allow us to version them more frequently and respond more quickly when an issue in those modules needs to be addressed. It also means that community members can more easily provide patches or support for newer or older versions themselves with fewer dependencies than working in our main source tree.

Of course, the Forge also contains projects initiated and led by members of the Terracotta community. If you would like to start a Forge project, you can submit a proposal here. Having a Forge project means getting access to Subversion, automated build, test, deploy, artifact and web site hosting, etc.

The Forge infrastructure is heavily based on Maven and many kudos go to Jason, Juris, Eugene, and others for all the hard work that went into making it come to life. Terracotta is now publishing our product and forge artifacts into the Terracotta Maven repository and ultimately into the main public Maven repositories. This makes getting started with Terracotta even easier than before. It’s really easy now to create a new Maven project using the Terracotta POJO or web app archetypes and have a project building in no time.

If you’d like to get a full tour of using Maven with Terracotta, I highly recommend checking out Taylor’s webcast tomorrow (Dec 12th, 1 pm PST) about this very topic! You can register for the webcast here.