EntityBroker 1.3.3 released

The new 1.3.3 version of EntityBroker is released. This includes a bunch of new features to make working with Sakai easier but the biggest improvement is full support for RESTful URLs. Now a developer can write an EntityProvider and implement a handful of interfaces and end up with REST access to their entities. This now allows developers to expose data from within Sakai to be read and written via REST calls by other Sakai apps, Sakai helpers, external apps (PHP, Perl, etc.), and client side widgets. This includes support for transformation of entity POJOs to and from JSON and XML automatically. Like everything else in EB, this can be disabled or controlled explicitly if desired. More details on the RESTful entities page.
The other major change in this release is the DeveloperHelperService. This is a shared service that the EntityBroker provides. This service makes it easier to deal with current Sakai data as entity references. Methods include getting current user/location/tool and generating URLs to work with entites and within Sakai. It also provides for some protection against shifting Sakai service APIs as this service API will remain stable and allow access to common things like current user and site without requiring knowledge of the Sakai service structure.
There are few minor improvements in the new version like support for persistent entity properties (without using hibernate) and support for persistent entity tags. There are also improvements in the classloader handling to ensure that the entity system will not hold onto class resources when a classloader reloads (e.g. webapp reload). Thanks to testing by Stephen Marquard this release should be fully backwards compatible with the pervious version.