Informa 0.7.0 Alpha 2

Informa projects goal is to provide a news aggregation library based on the Java Platform. The idea was born by the authors of two Java news reader applications (HotSheet and Risotto).
We intended to unify the common parts into a library which can be used by any developer who needs to address those issues in their application.
What is the scope of Informa?
With Informa we enable you with a harmonised view on a news channel object model. Both channels and news items do have metadata assigned, it does not make any difference from which channel format they were originally retrieved (RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0 / RDF, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0).
To ease finding relevant news items an integration with the full-text search engine (Jakartas Lucene) may be used optionally.
Besides exporting news channels in a specified XML format there is a persistence backend available using the Hibernate O/R mapping framework. This allows to persist the whole object model into a JDBC-compliant relational database. As default database HypersonicSQL was chosen, because it is very easy to embed.
Alternatively you may want to give the other persistent backend based on Castor JDO storage mechanism a try (from Informa release 0.7.0 not any longer supported).
Enhancements:
- Informa was migrated to Java JDK 5.
- The auto-generation of Hibernate mapping files with XDoclet was dropped in order to have full control over the mapping definition.
- Hibernate was upgraded from version 2 to 3.
- A new persistence manager allows you to integrate more easily with your Spring-Hibernate configuration.
- Some bugs were removed.
- The Atom parser was greatly improved.