The Codehaus Castor team is proud to announce Castor 1.2! Castor is an open source data binding framework, supporting binding of Java objects to both relational databases and XML.

Castor 1.2 incorporates several improvements, mainly in the area of XML code generation and support for Java 5:

* Castor XML code generator now (optionally) uses Velocity as template engine.
* New binaries packaging: XML schema support has been moved to a separate (and new) JAR.
* Support for native Java 5 code has been improved (includes XML code generation).
* The usage of XML parsers has been completely refactored, incl. the
run-time dependencies.

In addition, a lot of work has been done to prepare for a first (partial) alpha release of the upcoming JAXB support for Castor XML.

Please see the release notes for details about features added and bugs fixed.

Many thanks to those who helped build and test this release!