Pop the champagne! I just released JDOM 1.0.
Man this feels good. I'm gonna go out with some friends to party tonight, then heading to FOO Camp for the weekend. Ahh. A great moment in life.
It took four years to get here. We should have arrived three years ago. Beta 7 from the fall of 2001 was definitely worthy of being a 1.0 release. Stable, robust, useful. We just didn't call it 1.0 because there were some API changes we wanted to make that would break backward compatibility. We kept the Beta name not for the sake of quality but as a way to warn people about API shifts we saw coming. Was it right to wait? Perhaps not. We could have used 2.0 to indicate an API change like most commercial software.
The good news is we've made the API changes already, we've gotten them widely tested, and we're confident enough in this API that we don't see any reason to break backward compatibility in future releases. So if the Beta moniker kept you from JDOM in the past, it's time to jump on board.
Thanks to everyone who's been involved in the project over the years. It's been an amazing collaborative effort with people the world over contributing code and ideas. I've learned a lot, and met (virtually and in the real world) a lot of great people.
Sorry it took so long. You can't say I don't test my work, though!