Dec 17, 2014 - HAPI FHIR 0.8 Released - HAPI 0.8 has been released! As always, thanks to everyone who contributed on this; this release includes a lot of bug fixes and new features from around the world.
See the changelog for a complete list of what's new!
In particular, this release marks the beginning of our push to separate the model classes (e.g. Patient, Encounter, etc.) from the core API, so that you can use any version of the structures you want in your application, or even combine versions if you need to. As is the case with HAPI's HL7 v2 library, you now need to include at least one new separate "structures" JAR with your application as of HAPI-FHIR 0.8. See the Upgrading and Download pages for more information.
With the newly separated "structures" dependencies, we have also introduced a separate "dev" version of the structures, which contains the current development structure definitions, which are now close to being in their final DSTU2 state (DSTU2 should be released in mid 2015 by HL7 although the date is not yet finalized). DSTU2 contains a number of new and updated resource definitions, but it also makes several infrastructure changes including a new Bundle format and a new encoding style for extensions in JSON. These changes are not yet supported in HAPI-FHIR 0.8, but will be included in HAPI-FHIR 0.9. We expect to deploy a working snapshot build of HAPI-FHIR 0.9 within the next day or so, including all of these changes.
One further note: We are currently working with Grahame Grieve on an initiative to harmonize HAPI's model objects with the FHIR Java Reference Implementation. This means that developers should in the future be able to use either the HAPI built-in resource definitions or the ones shipped by HL7. The advantage to this is that it will allow users of HAPI's API to take advantage of other tooling produced by HL7 (such as profile validators). Please get in touch (either by email or on the Google Group) if you would like to help test this.