The milestone release of jBilling 2 is now available for download. It includes hundreds of changes, most of them are minor enhancements and bug fixes, but there are major improvements as well:

• Application server independent: The default download comes with Tomcat, but deploying on other application servers will be easy. The application is bundled as a single war file.
• MQ independent: The default here is ActiveMQ, but again, you can configure jBilling to run on your favorite MQ implementation.
• API improvements: several new methods, including an instant payment processing with automatic linking to outstanding invoices and the ability to run the billing process for a single user on-demand.
• New telco invoice design which includes the events as an invoice appendix. This what shows every call detail (or the details of other events, if they are not phone calls).
• Pre-paid balance management. In this case, the customer increases her balance by submitting a payment, and the balance decreases with every purchase (usage). You can make an API call to validate if a customer can make a purchase. The validation is against the price of the intended purchase against the current balance.
• Credit limit. For a customer with a credit limit, every purchase increases the balance which should not exceed the preset credit limit. Again, an API method can be called to validate purchases against the credit balance before they happen.
• Account hierarchies of any depth. There used to be a limit of two levels: parent and child. No more, you can now build hierarchical structures of any depth, and mark any user as the one receiving an invoice.
• Events-to-rules plug-in. There is a new plug-in that allows you to run rules when any internal event in jBilling happens. This takes the extensibility of jBilling to a new level, it combines the plug-in architecture and the internal events design with the business rules management system.

For a complete list of changes, take a look to the release notes.