Continuing our journey towards Hibernate Search 4, we decided to add a Beta2 to the schedule.
Hibernate Core is no more a required dependency
The main feature is the full abstraction of Hibernate Search from Hibernate Core. This is especially good news for Infinispan Query users who won't have to drag Hibernate Core and its dependencies anymore. Once can write an integration between Hibernate Search and another datastore: all the contracts have been fleshed out.
If we have done our job right, you will have nothing to change in your Maven dependency declaration while migrating to this version. hibernate-search is still the main artifact to include, but it is now just a shell depending on the new hibernate-search-orm module.
We also have upgraded to Lucene 3.4 which contains performance improvements and important bug fixes.
Translate the documentation
On a completely different note we moved the Hibernate Search documentation to Zanata which is a web-based system for translators to translate documentation using a web-browser. So far it was quite hard for translators to contribute. They had to checkout the source code, install the publican toolchain and run multiple maven commands. With Zanata a translator can just contribute translations without installing anything. All you have to do is to join the JBoss community of translators by following the steps described in the Zanata Getting Started Guide and start translating. Hopefully this will encourage some more people to contribute. It never has been easier :-)
And of course, Hibernate Search 4 comes with new features like near real time search, new per-index backend architecture, Hibernate Core 4 support, new portable and efficient binary format between nodes. You can read more in our previous blog posts.
Get the release
Check out the release and as usual, make sure you read the Migration guide when you upgrade from a previous version.
