In Relation To

We are glad to announce that the new Hibernate ORM User Guide has become the default Hibernate 5.1 reference documentation. This process was started last summer, and it was one of the primary goals of the Hibernate 5 project version.

Previously, all the documentation was written in DocBook, and we wanted to move away to a more human-friendly format. Thanks to Dan Allen and the Asciidoctor community, we now have a tool to write technical documentation where the actual content doesn’t get lost in a myriad of XML markup tags.

All the examples are embedded from unit tests which are, of course, available on GitHub. This way, we ensure that all code snippets are valid and relevant in the future as well (removing a deprecated class will trigger a test failure, and we can immediately update the broken example).

The previous documentation was featuring many XML-based examples which were no longer relevant for the vast majority of our users. Because it is very common to use Hibernate as a JPA provider, most examples are written according to the Java Persistence API specifications but, since Hibernate is more than a JPA provider, we also feature Hibernate-specific examples which cover use cases that are not supported by the JPA standard.

As previously stated, the User Guide is not finished yet. In the near future, we are going to enhance the following sections as well:

Enjoy reading it and we are looking forward to getting your feedback!