Thanks to everyone for all the contributions. We have had a lot of really good improvements and patches submitted.
2.5 has a major redesign of the Semantic Module Framework, and it now generates bin/src bundles behind the scenes for deployment (and possibly debugging). This can also allow for fast startup times which is handy for people in a non server environment. The rules classes are now loaded quite differently. There are some API changes that you may or may not notice. The whole shebang can be gotten from: http://dist.codehaus.org/drools/distributions/drools-2.5-beta-1-bin-withdeps.zip Note that there are quite a few changes in dependencies. It now uses the Eclipse JDT compiler by default for java (hence the larger download size). Please give it a go and log all issues as usual. The SMF improvements in particular are a key foundation for Drools 3.0. Regards, Michael. PS the individual module jars are in the usual place: http://dist.codehaus.org/drools/jars/ - note that you can't mix and match modules from 2.5 with 2.1 in general.