Sonatype is announcing a milestone release of Nexus 1.9 for our partners, developers, and integrators. This version includes a number of changes and bug fixes in addition to some important changes to core APIs.
While end-users are more than welcome to download this pre-release version of Nexus, we're not announcing the general availability of Nexus 1.9 just yet. This announcement is just a heads up to the various plugin developers that have come to rely upon Nexus, and this is a chance for developers to start experimenting with some of the security and event handling changes that are scheduled for the next major release of Nexus.
Sonatype swapped out Nexus' security framework, moving from JSecurity to Apache Shiro, details on that can be found in Brian Demers' email to the developer's list. For end-users, there is zero impact from this switch to a new security framework.
All event handling in Nexus used to be done synchronously, which in a number of cases slowed down different actions. Deployments would have to wait for index merges, different jobs could interrupt essential system level tasks. While Sonatype rarely received error reports that related to this problem, we did start to notice some issues on our largest installations. We've taken some of the lessons learned from our internet-scale installations and fed them back into the core architecture.
You should see performance improvements with retrieving and deploying artifacts, and as your Nexus instance scales to support thousands of developers you will benefit from asynchronous event inspectors. Once again, if you are an end-user, you won't notice a difference other than greater performance.
If you are developing plugins or extensions to Nexus, you should download and test your plugins and extensions with this Milestone release. If you are an end-user looking for product support, we recommend that you not upgrade to Nexus 1.9 at this time.
You can download the bundle from here (as usual tar.gz and zip available):
Let us know if you have any problems. You may also open an issue at https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/NEXUS.