HATS 7.5 Announcement

IBM has announced that HATS 7.5 will become available on November 26 of this year. While there are no major new features, the largest benefit will be support for the new 7.5 code stream of the development platforms (RSA, RAD, RBD, RDi, RDz, etc), which runs on top of Eclipse 3.4. There is a word of caution, however for those customers who have RCP style HATS projects. This is from the business partner internal memorandum:

The HATS 7.5 announcement indicates to customers that support for visually editing HATS rich client transformations and templates is no longer available in the HATS Toolkit. Although this statement is true at GA time, it is possible that a solution will found by 2Q 2009. This issue occurred because the Eclipse Visual Editor was dropped from the latest release of Eclipse (3.4), and so was not included in the latest Rational tools, which HATS sits on top of. HATS development is exploring options for supporting an Eclipse 3.4-compatible version of the Eclipse Visual Editor in an upcoming service release.
For now, we recommend that existing HATS rich client customers remain on HATS 7.1 (since there are also no significant enhancements to rich client support in HATS 7.5). For potential new rich client customers, the HATS 7.1 trial will remain available on the Web until this issue is fully resolved.

Unless you are running RCP, you can assume it safe to upgrade your projects and platforms to 7.5. This will allow you to run HATS on a WebSphere App Server 7.0 runtime, and subsequently a Java 6 SDK. This release of Java was focused on speed and performance rather than new code features.