Questions about Enhydra 5.1beto8

Hi folks!

Today I moved our project from Enhydra 5 to Enhydra 5.1beta8. In general it 
worked fine, was only 15 minutes work. But some questions are left so I ask 
these to the Enhydra community:

1) We use Castor (www.castor.org) for O/R mapping. Why do I still need the 
dods-runtime.jar? I removed everything related to the DatabaseManager stuff 
from my config file.

2) Is the ServerPageRedirectException now working in Enhydra 5.1?

3) Is the enconding of the session id in the URL now working?

4) When will Enhydra 5.1 final be released?

Thank you for your help in advance!