In Relation To

The EJB3 persistence specification calls for implementors to support Bulk Operations in EJB-QL (the EJB Query Language). As part of Hibernate's implementation of EJB3 persistence, HQL (the Hibernate Query Language : which is a superset of EJB-QL) needed to support these Bulk Operations. This support is now code complete, even going beyond what is offered in the EJB3 persistence specification. There is one task outstanding against this bulk operation support in HQL, but this is completely beyond the scope of the support called for in the EJB3 persistence specification. I'll blog about this one later as it simply rocks ;)

New to Hibernate 3.0.1 is the SessionFactory.getCurrentSession() method. It allows application developers to delegate tracking of current sessions to Hibernate itself. This is fairly trivial functionality, but stuff just about any user of Hibernate had to implement themselves, or rely on third party stuff to do for them. Let's take a look at how this is implemented in Hibernate and how it might be useful.

Another major change in Hibernate3 is the evolution to use an event and listener paradigm as its core processing model. This allows very fine-grained hooks into Hibernate internal processing in response to external, application initiated requests. It even allows customization or complete over-riding of how Hibernate reacts to these requests. It really serves as an expansion of what Hibernate tried to acheive though the earlier Interceptor, Lifecycle, and Validatable interafaces.

Hibernate3 adds the ability to pre-define filter criteria and attach those filters at both a class and a collection level. What's a pre-defined filter criteria? Well, it's the ability to define a limit clause very similiar to the existing where attribute available on the class and various collection elements. Except these filter conditions can be parameterized! The application can then make the decision at runtime whether given filters should be enabled and what their parameter values should be.