We got dissed by a Spring developer!

But Rod, you'd make /such/ a great Egghead! Well ... if you didn't take youself so damn seriously, that is ;-)

While we're on the topic, who else has noticed that Rod has a double-phallic name?

Hibernate 3.0 is the world's most sophisticated ORXM (Object/Relational/XML Mapping) solution. Hibernate3 makes it easier than ever before for Java applications to interact with persistent data, allowing a single definition of the transformation between various in-memory representations of the entity data and the relational schema, even in the case of very complex legacy schemas and schemas for historical data or data with visibility rules. Hibernate3 also provides the most comprehensive object/relational query functionality, with three full-featured query facilities: Hibernate Query Language, the newly enhanced Hibernate Criteria Query API, and enhanced support for queries expressed in the native SQL dialect of the database.

Compared to Hibernate 2.1 - the most popular object/relational mapping solution in any language - Hibernate 3.0 offers:

• Much more flexible O/R mapping: support for exotic association and inheritance mappings, and greater flexibility when working with legacy data.

• Hibernate3 filters: a unique feature for working with temporal (historical), regional or permissioned data.

• Unprecendented flexibility for mixing handwritten and generated SQL within a single application or even a single entity: full support for derived entities and attributes defined in the mapping document, full support for overriding any generated SQL statement with handwritten SQL, support for stored procedures.

• Object/Relational/XML mapping: query XML directly from the database for reporting, replicate data between databases via intermediate XML, externalize entity data as XML when interacting with remote systems.

• Enhanced ease of use: better defaulting, an unchecked exceptions model, simplified natural (and composite) key support, simplified CMT integration.

• Enhanced Criteria query API: with full support for projection/aggregation and subselects.

• Runtime performance monitoring: via JMX or local Java API, including a second-level cache browser.

• Brand new AST-based HQL parser: bulk update/delete enhancement, better syntax validation.

• JBoss EJB 3.0 preview: support for annotation-based O/R mappings, full support for EJB-QL 3.0, support for EJB 3.0 persist()/merge() lifecycle, JACC-based security model.

• Hibernate Tools preview: a full suite of Eclipse plugins for working with Hibernate 3.0, including mapping editor, interactive query prototyping, schema reverse engineering tool.

• Many new extension points: including a new, extensible, event-driven architecture

• Documentation enhancements.

• Brand new test suite, including many useful examples of exotic Hibernate mappings.

A full list of new features may be found at: http://www.hibernate.org/About/RoadMap

Download link: http://www.hibernate.org/Download/DownloadOverview

The Hibernate 3.0 core is 68,549 lines of Java code together with 27,948 lines of unit tests, all freely available under the LGPL, and has been in development for well over a year. We would like to thank the many people who contributed to this release!

The Hibernate Team,

• Max Rydahl Andersen, JBoss Inc

• Christian Bauer, JBoss Inc

• Emmanuel Bernard

• David Channon

• Joshua Davis

• Steve Ebersole, JBoss Inc

• Michael Gloegl

• Gavin King, JBoss Inc

• Anthony Patricio

Cedric beat me to this, but if you missed his announcement, the EJB 3.0 second early draft is available. The most interesting new stuff to me is:

• the new callback listener/interceptor architecture

• the separate document dealing with entity beans that will evolve into a complete specification out-of-container operation of the entity manager (the persistence engine)

• native SQL queries

• definition of interoperability with legacy EJB 2.1 clients and servers

• complete specification of the semantics of association mappings

• complete specification of the semantics of EJBQL

There is also an example of what the XML-based ORM metadata might look like. This is intended to spark discussion and is certainly not final at this stage.

Of course, there are many other revisions compared to EDR1. (Those were just the ones I could think of now.)

The goals for a next draft include

• API for obtaining an EntityManager outside the container

• more complete definition of XML-based deployment descriptors

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=220

Before I go, I can't overemphasize how important the new @Interceptor stuff is - for a long time we've been unable to extend the basic set of EJB services in a portable way. Yes, you could do it in JBoss, using JBoss-specific APIs, and in WebLogic using BEA-specific APIs, but that just isn't good enough! One immediate consequence of this new feature is that people will be able to build /EJB frameworks/. I anticipate a whole new marketplace for open source addons to EJB, just like there is a profusion of web-tier frameworks today. But unlike web-tier frameworks, the architecture lends itself to combining different extensions in the same application! It's interesting; the original EJB vision was for a marketplace of reuseable /application components/, which didn't eventuate. /This/ feature will further foster the availability of reuseable /infrastructure services/, which actually /has/ worked in practice (though it hasn't worked so well for EJB).

Enjoy!

We just released the brand new Hibernate Annotations module as an alpha version. This module provides the Hibernate facilities to declare Hibernate O/R mapping metadata through JDK 5.0 metadata annotations (instead of XML mapping files or XDoclet preprocessing). We have implemented the EJB3 (JSR-220) O/R metadata annotations defined in the early draft 1 of the spec. This set of annotations covers all common mappings cases.

Next step for us is to provide custom annotations to cover Hibernate specific features while following the EJB3 spec evolutions.

This tool is designed for easy-of-dev and quick application development (mapping metadata in the sources, no preprocessing step, configuration by exception minimizing the metadata declarations). Give a try to this new programming model. Feedbacks are welcome, especially on the Hibernate specific features you want to see covered by annotations.

Download it and have a look at the tutorial and the comprehensive test suite. It will give some good samples.

We just released Hibernate 3.0 beta 1. I've no time to list all the many changes since the alpha was released four months ago, let alone everything that is new in Hibernate3, which has been in development for over a year now.

The most exciting new thing from our point of view is the new AST-based HQL parser, written by Joshua Davis. It uses 3 ANTLR grammars to transform HQL/EJBQL to SQL. The work on this is not quite finished, but almost all legacy tests pass. You can try out the new query parser by setting

hibernate.query.factory_class=org.hibernate.hql.ast.ASTQueryTranslatorFactor

I'll try to get Joshua to blog about the design of the parser (very cool stuff).