It is now possible to specify the Java classpath individually for each JMon application or Java plug-in, using a new classpath element in the jar file's deployment descriptor XML or @Application annotation. See Specifying the classpath in deployment descriptor files.

When you start a correlator and specify the -J option you can now specify -J-Djava.class.path=path and the path you specify will be appended to all internal Apama JAR files. In previous releases, Apama used only the setting of the CLASSPATH environment variable. If you specify both the CLASSPATH environment variable and a classpath on the command line then the classpath specified on the command line takes precedence.

The MATLAB plug-in has been moved from the Apama Capital Markets Foundation into Apama 5.3. This plug-in includes the MATLAB bundle, libraries and executables that let Apama applications use MATLAB products. Documentation for using MATLAB products in an Apama application is now in the Apama 5.3 documentation set.

The Apama extensions for the Pysys testing framework now include injectCDP() method to allow a CDP to be injected into a correlator from within a test.

The event parse error logged by the correlator now contains the character offset of the error and the field member name that was being parsed. The expected event format logged is now recursive so nested event fields are also fully logged.

Apama 5.3 incorporates ICU (International Components for Unicode) time-zone data update 2014j_44, which is the most recent update at the time of release. This will update time-zone data used by the correlator and TimeFormat correlator plug-in.

The behavior of escaping in mapping literal expressions in the correlator JMS and Web Services Client adapter has been changed. Previously, literal expressions in mapping were evaluated as is without any escaping. Now a slash (\) is used as the escape character. Now a double quote (") is escaped as \", a single quote (') is escaped as \' and a slash (\) is escaped as \\. Quotes only need to be escaped if a string value is enclosed in the same type of quote. So the literal expression "a quote \' is string" was previously evaluated as "a quote \' is string", but it is now evaluated as "a quote ' is string".

Several performance improvements have been made to the Parse() and Text (formatting) implementation of the .NET event parser. This has resulted in a small change of behavior in Event.FieldsMap, which previously returned a SortedDictionary with a deterministic key iteration order (based on the natural ordering of the keys) but now returns an unordered dictionary with non-deterministic iteration order. For rare cases where deterministic ordering is required, users should wrap the FieldsMap result in a new SortedDictionary instance before iterating over it.

The default consistency mode for BigMemory configurations is now EVENTUAL (the BigMemory default) rather than STRONG, and synchronousWrites has been disabled. Existing configurations will not be updated automatically, and users are still able to enable STRONG consistency if needed, but due to its superior performance, EVENTUAL is recommended when using Apama with the latest BigMemory release.