Release notes for LensKit 0.0.3

The Git changelog and the list of closed tickets and pull requests provide more information on what has happened, including bugs that have been fixed.

This release contains many large changes, including significant architectural and API changes to make it easier to take LensKit forward. Highlights include:

• Dropped our use of Guice for dependency injection and configuration. Recommenders are now configured with the LenskitRecommenderComponentFactory class. PicoContainer provides the underlying infrastructure, but this will be changing in the future.

• Renamed and refactored classes in the recommender implementations to improve clarity and consistency.

• Upgraded to Maven 3 (#issue(38)); Maven 2 is currently unsupported for building LensKit. LensKit can, of course, be used by Maven 2 projects without problem.

• Lots of documentation improvements.

• Introduce ImmutableSparseVector and build more robust type-checking for mutability guarantees on sparse vectors.

• Drop thread safety guarantee on UserRatingProfile. Many profile implementations will likely be thread-safe, but we’re not promising it any more.

• Add a session concept to data access objects to make it easier to deal with database handle scoping and related issues.

• Use Ant to manage evaluations. This allows for more flexible evaluation processing setups.