This past month we launched SOA Summer School, and thousands of members of our community have joined in. But that's not the only thing keeping us busy - we've also been hard at work on the next generation of our OSGi-based product lineup. The componentized Carbon architecture has matured, along with OSGi domain knowledge, and we are ready to ship a matured stable set of products to the community. Apart from being a much more stable release, the new-and-improved Carbon framework also carries additional features including the Rules support in ESB, Governance support in the Registry, a transactional JMS transport and many more improvements. This generation is in the Release Candidate (RC) phase now and will become GA very soon.

On that note, it is interesting to note how WSO2 defines the release life cycle:

• Milestone releases - Each and every milestone will add a set of new features, but we try our best to limit the new features in a given milestone to a absolute minimum (like only one) to make it easier to find what new features cause any potential regressions, if there are any.
• Alpha release - All features are complete, but there is no guarantee on stability.
• Beta releases - All Level 1 issues are fixed and the release is guaranteed to be stable from the development perspective.
• Release Candidates - All Level 1 and Level 2 issues are fixed and the release is ready for development purposes.
• General Availability - Ready for production environments.

Stay tuned to WSO2 OxygenTank to see these product releases getting off the ground. Until then, we welcome you to try out the RC versions and provide your feedback to our development team!