[RELEASE] Driver 4.4.0

[Olivier Michallat]

We've just released version 4.4.0 of the driver.

This version brings a huge usability improvement: we will now deliver all OSS and DSE functionality into a unified, Apache License v2.0, open-source driver. You can read more about this in this blog post.

What this means in concrete terms for Java driver users is:

• if you were using the OSS driver, reactive execution is now available out of the box (session.executeReactive).
  Apart from that, you might just notice a few non-breaking API changes, and additional dependencies (that can be excluded if you don't need DSE features).
• if you were using the DSE driver, you'll need to adjust your driver dependency to use the "OSS" coordinates. The unified driver is a drop-in replacement for the DSE driver, but note that a few DSE-specific types have been deprecated, notably DseSession. They will still work, but you should eventually switch to the default types, like CqlSession.

Refer to the upgrade guide for further details.

Here is the full changelog:

- [documentation] JAVA-2607: Improve visibility of driver dependencies section
- [documentation] JAVA-1975: Document the importance of using specific TinkerPop version
- [improvement] JAVA-2529: Standardize optional/excludable dependency checks
- [bug] JAVA-2598: Do not use context class loader when attempting to load classes
- [improvement] JAVA-2582: Don't propagate a future into SchemaQueriesFactory
- [documentation] JAVA-2542: Improve the javadocs of methods in CqlSession
- [documentation] JAVA-2609: Add docs for proxy authentication to unified driver
- [improvement] JAVA-2554: Improve efficiency of InsightsClient by improving supportsInsights check
- [improvement] JAVA-2601: Inject Google Tag Manager scripts in generated API documentation
- [improvement] JAVA-2551: Improve support for DETERMINISTIC and MONOTONIC functions
- [documentation] JAVA-2446: Revisit continuous paging javadocs
- [improvement] JAVA-2550: Remove warnings in ContinuousCqlRequestHandler when coordinator is not replica
- [improvement] JAVA-2569: Make driver compatible with Netty < 4.1.34 again
- [improvement] JAVA-2541: Improve error messages during connection initialization
- [improvement] JAVA-2530: Expose shortcuts for name-based UUIDs
- [improvement] JAVA-2547: Add method DriverConfigLoader.fromPath
- [improvement] JAVA-2528: Store suppressed exceptions in AllNodesFailedException
- [new feature] JAVA-2581: Add query builder support for indexed list assignments
- [improvement] JAVA-2596: Consider collection removals as idempotent in query builder
- [bug] JAVA-2555: Generate append/prepend constructs compatible with legacy C* versions
- [bug] JAVA-2584: Ensure codec registry is able to create codecs for collections of UDTs and tuples
- [bug] JAVA-2583: IS NOT NULL clause should be idempotent
- [improvement] JAVA-2442: Don't check for schema agreement twice when completing a DDL query
- [improvement] JAVA-2473: Don't reconnect control connection if protocol is downgraded
- [bug] JAVA-2556: Make ExecutionInfo compatible with any Request type
- [new feature] JAVA-2532: Add BoundStatement ReturnType for insert, update, and delete DAO methods
- [improvement] JAVA-2107: Add XML formatting plugin
- [bug] JAVA-2527: Allow AllNodesFailedException to accept more than one error per node
- [improvement] JAVA-2546: Abort schema refresh if a query fails

As usual, the driver is available from Maven central:

<dependency>

  <groupId>com.datastax.oss</groupId>

  <artifactId>java-driver-core</artifactId>

  <version>4.4.0</version>

</dependency>

We also published relocation POMs for the DSE coordinates. If you reference com.datastax.dse:dse-java-driver-core:2.4.0 in your application, Maven will log a warning and automatically switch to the artifact above (same for other modules like the query builder and mapper).

This will be done only this one time; for future unified releases, you'll need to explicitly switch to the new coordinates.

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The Java driver team