This weekend I pushed two new releases to maven central: 1.6.0-RC1 and 2.0.0-RC1. These are two momentous releases that I’m personally terribly excited about. The 1.6 release, and indeed the branch, serves two main purpose:
- It brings Morphia in to compatibility with the 4.0 driver. Since the 4.0 driver requires a minimum of Java 8, Morphia 1.6 also requires this as a minimum JVM level.
- This release attempts to provide as many deprecations and guides to prepare for the eventual 2.0 migration. Not all items can be replaced in 1.6 but where possible, there are new alternatives to move to to help ensure a smoother upgrade to 2.0.
There are, of course, a few bug fixes included in the release as well.
The 2.0 RC marks what I hope is the API complete update for the release. If you’ve been curious but have been holding back, I encourage you to give this release a spin. I’ve been using it for a while now and moving back to the 1.x API honestly makes me a little sad. 
The official document site can be found at https://morphia.dev/. Full release notes can be found at the follow locations:
1.6.0: Release Version 1.6.0-RC1 · MorphiaOrg/morphia · GitHub
2.0.0: Release Version 2.0.0-RC1 · MorphiaOrg/morphia · GitHub
Issues can be filed on the github site. Happy coding.