You may remember a discussion of the mixin concept. Since then I've integrated the cayenne-mixin module into 2 of my projects and have been gradually migrating various custom-coded solutions to cayenne-mixin. This resulted in a few cool generic features in Cayenne core (lifecycle annotations, DataChannelFilter), as well as a number of new things in the mixin module.
What we ended up with is a neat generic mechanism that I would call "annotations-based lifecycle and workflow management". Mixins (the ability to add special runtime properties to existing objects) are just one aspect of it, and I haven't solved any of the limitations that we discussed before. Nevertheless the new framework is extremely useful for higher level event-driven programming in Cayenne (lower level being managing per-event per-object lifecycle listeners). It has a few generic concepts - UUID/Referenceable, ChangeSet, and a few defined "event handlers" (or "workflow handlers") for audit management, cache invalidation. Users can create their own business-specific extensions and their own lifecycle annotations (which I am doing actively in my apps). So I am suggestion to move cayenne-mixin to the main development tree from sandbox (under the name "cayenne-lifecycle") and include it in 3.1 releases as a separate jar. This will allow our users to get the "official" builds of cayenne-lifecycle, and hopefully won't create release scheduling conflicts between the core and lifecycle. My hope that this meta-programming facility will streamline implementation of many common scenarios for our users. Comments? Andrus
