$Id: RELEASE-NOTES.txt,v 1.2 2002/05/17 15:24:11 jstrachan Exp $

			 Commons Betwixt Package
			   Version 1.0-Alpha-1
			    Release Notes

INTRODUCTION:

Betwixt provides a flexible way to map beans into XML - and vice versa. This is the 
first betwixt release.

There's quite a lot of work to be done before Betwixt is ready for a full 
release - but it's already used by other projects. This alpha will give a 
versioned release for these projects to depend on. A word of warning - though 
the betwixt developers take backwards compatible very seriously, it's likely that
some parts of the internal API are going to have to change - and some of these 
changes may break compatibility. 

NEW FEATURES:

Everything :)

But here's some features you might like to take a look at:

* Betwixt can write beans to character streams or as SAX events
* Betwixt builds on Digester (http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/digester.html) 
  to allow xml to be read (using SAX) and mapping into beans in a compatible way
* Betwixt supports powerful pluggable general strategies but also allows mappings 
  to be customized at the bean level.


BUG FIXES:

KNOWN LIMITATIONS:
* This release of betwixt does not validate the element and attribute names 
  specified in .betwixt files to ensure that they will produce well formed xml. 
  Please take care to ensure that the names you choose for you elements and 
  attributes will result in well formed xml.
* Betwixt is not usable for swing components, unless you write a wrapper class 
  around the Swing component. The XMLEncoder that is used in JDK 1.4.x does a 
  better job in this, by analyzing what is needed based on what clone() does and 
  custom processing for swing components. If you really need this and are writing 
  wrappers around swing components, please contribute it to the betwixt project.