HAPI Announcement: Version 1.0 Released

As a follow-up to my recent post, the release of HAPI 1.0 was announced via email yesterday afternoon:

HAPI 1.0 is released!

After a fairly long beta period, I'm excited to announce that HAPI has finally reached 1.0. Download it here!

This release packs in a lot of new features, some major speed improvements, and several fixes to long standing (but hard to fix) bugs. For a good summary of what's in this release, see the what's new page, and the changelog.

Questions and answers about this release:

• Q: What is the significance of the 1.0 version number?

  A: Absolutely nothing. HAPI has been a production grade library for many years now, and over the years we've received quite a few inquiries from people hesitant to incorporate a library with a pre-release version number into their software. The move to 1.0 is nothing more than a signal that HAPI is good to go.

• Q: Why the long period between releases?

  A: This release contained a major rewrite of the internals of the PipeParser, which is pretty much at the heart of most people's use of HAPI. This rewrite was neccesary in order both to speed things up, and to fix a number of problems with the existing logic in handling unexpected custom segments and provide more predictable behaviour. Because of this, we wanted to make sure we got it right. This release has been thoroughly tested in a number of applications, including some heavy duty production use, so we are now confident that it's ready.

• Q: What's next?

  A: Hopefully a new release of hUnit will be out soon, and then hopefully our first HAPI release in this post-1.0 world. 🙂 Let us know what you would like to see in it!

As an aside for anyone wondering why we always seem to release on the weekend, the answer is this: Now that HAPI supports 8 versions of HL7 and includes both compiled and source distributions and has both the complete sources and javadocs on the site, it literally takes all day to upload a new release to sourceforge. The site alone is 30,000 files, or 921Mb, and it seems like the weekend is the only time I can free up enough time to nurse such a huge transfer along.

Cheers,
James Agnew