This section details some of the main changes made to the TM4J API between version 0.7.0 and 0.8.0. You should read this chapter if you have used the previous version of TM4J to find out how (and why) the TM4J API is changing.

One of the biggest changes to the API has been in the location of the methods used to create objects in a TopicMap. In previous versions of TM4J, this was all done through the TopicMapFactory interface. Starting with this version of TM4J, you instead use factory methods on the parent object to create its children. This is described in more detail in the section called “Factory Methods”.

Two new back-ends are supported in TM4J 0.8.0, the Hibernate back-end (see the section called “Configuration of the Hibernate Topic Map Provider”) provides persistent storage in a range of relational database systems and the Unified back-end (see Chapter 10, Unified Topic Maps) provides a way of creating a view of multiple topic maps as if they had all been merged into a single topic map.

A number of new utility classes have been added to TM4J. These are described in more detail in Chapter 7, TM4J Utilities.