Postby jefffischer » Wed Sep 07, 2011 12:02 pm
There will be a smooth upgrade path between major GA releases based on a migration document. Bleeding edge development using milestone releases can expect API and domain refactoring that may cause (as you mention) beans to be moved around or general compilation errors. However, this will generally be relatively easy to resolve.
The biggest pain point will be domain changes during Broadleaf milestone development that result in database schema changes. We suggest developers use a local database during development of their Broadleaf Commerce implementation and take advantage of Hibernate's auto-ddl features to create-drop the schema upon container launch/shutdown and seed the database using import.sql. This approach helps to mitigate any schema volatility during development.