Hibernate ORM 5.2 release

The 5.2.0 release of Hibernate ORM has just been tagged and published.

Many of the changes in 5.2.0 have important ramifications in terms of both usage and extension. Be sure to read the 5.2 Migration Guide for details.

The complete list of changes can be found here. Below is a discussion of the major changes.

Java 8 baseline

5.2 moves to Java 8 as its baseline, both for JDK and JRE. This means:

The hibernate-java8 module has been removed; that functionality has been consolidated into hibernate-core.
Native support for Java 8 date/time types as Query parameters.
Support for streaming (java.util.stream.Stream) query results.
Support for java.util.Optional as return from methods that may return null.
Leveraging Java 8 "default methods" when introducing new methods to extension points.

That effectively means that the hibernate-entitymanager module no longer exists. Its functionality has been consolidated into hibernate-core.

Support for using any JCache-compliant cache impl as a second-level caching provider. See HHH-10770.

Support has been added for specifying a batch size for write operations per Session. See HHH-10431.

For information on consuming the release via your favorite dependency-management-capable build tool, see https://hibernate.org/orm/downloads/

For those of you allergic to dependency-management-capable build tools, the release bundles can be obtained in ZIP or TGZ format from SourceForge.