With 157 issues closed since RC2, we are very close to the final (GA) release of Mule 2.0. Please help us iron out any last critical issues with this third Release Candidate.

• A couple of performance related issues have been resolved since RC2 and performance testing now shows that 2.0 performance is as good as 1.4.3

• The XFire transport has been deprecated in favor of CXF and all WS examples have been updated to use CXF instead.

• A generic "expression evaluation framework" has been introduced to extract configuration parameters from message header properties, message payload, message attachments, and more.

• The mule-core schema annotation is nearly complete, so you will now get more context-specific documentation when creating/editing your xml configurations.

• A bit more package re-organization and some Service/Component API changes.

• Schema changes related to the use of <component> and <pooled-object>.

For more complete information, see the Mule 2.0 Release Notes.

If you still haven't seen Mule 2.0, take a look at Whats New in Mule 2.0 and the Mule 2.0 Configuration Guide to get you started.

With no critical issues remaining, we are proud to announce the final/GA release of Mule 2.0. We would like to specially thank all those users who have provided feedback on and reported bugs in the Milestones and Release Candidates. We will continue updating the Mule documentation for 2.0 and encourage new users to get started with the following guides:

• Whats New in Mule 2.0
• Mule 2.0 Configuration Guide
• How to Create an XML Namespace