This is a first Beta release in the Hibernate ORM 5.3 family. 5.3 represents a JPA 2.2 compatible version on top of 5.2 which includes the changes discussed below.

See Jira for the complete list of changes

See the downloads page for details on obtaining this release

NOTE : we have been having trouble getting documentation uploaded to the JBoss doc server. So the documentation may not be available online at this time. In that case, the documentation can be obtained from the release bundles from SourceForge. See the downloads page

JPA 2.2 features

CDI-hosted AttributeConverters

Starting in JPA 2.1 applications could use CDI-hosted beans as entity event listeners. JPA 2.2 extends that support to allow AttributeConverters to be CDI-hosted beans as well.

To facilitate this, we have developed a generic interface that allows access to any kind of bean hosted in any type of DI/bean container. The contract for integrating such bean containers is org.hibernate.resource.beans.container.spi.BeanContainer. Hibernate comes with implementations of BeanContainer for integrating with CDI; we have also tested adapting it to Spring container. Generally speaking, Hibernate accesses BeanContainer though its org.hibernate.resource.beans.spi.ManagedBeanRegistry service which hides some of the repetitive details of dealing with BeanContainer based on Hibernate’s normal usage.

Applications would normally not access the BeanContainer nor the ManagedBeanRegistry. Integrators however might want to use them to leverage Hibernate integration with these back-end containers. ManagedBeanRegistry is a service and can be accessed from the SessionFactory’s ServiceRegistry. The BeanContainer can be accessed from there via ManagedBeanRegistry#getBeanContainer (which may return null).

Support for repeating annotations

JPA 2.2 defines support for repeating annotations (@java.lang.annotation.Repeatable). This includes the addition of @TableGenerators and @SequenceGenerators. All other JPA annotations already had "containing" annotations.

Query result streaming

JPA 2.2 adds Query#getStream to support streaming of the query results. Of course Hibernate has had this for some time, although we had named ours Query#stream more in keeping with the choice made in most other uses including most JDK uses. But either way, both are available.. the JPA javax.persistence.Query#getStream and Hibernate’s org.hibernate.query.Query#stream.

Support Java 8 Date and Time API

Again, this is something Hibernate has already supported for quite some time. But JPA 2.2 has made support for the Java 8 date/time APIs part of the standard.

Hibernate features

Caching and inheritance

5.3 adds the ability to enable/disable caching at any level within a mapped hierarchy. This is a change from previous versions that only allowed controlling caching on the root entity. See HHH-12146 for details

Java 9 module naming

Hibernate ORM jars now specify Java 9 module naming following the pattern org.hibernate.orm.${module-name}. For example, the module name for hibernate-core is org.hibernate.orm.core; the module name for hibernate-c3p0 is org.hibernate.orm.c3p0; etc.

JpaCompliance

During bootstrapping a SessionFactory/EntityManagerFactory can be configured with a level of "JPA compliance" that indicates what behaviors it should comply with JPA. These are generally situations where Hibernate has historically done something different or where we think the specification is not the best solution. This JpaCompliance is used to control how Hibernate should act in these circumstances. See the javadocs for org.hibernate.jpa.JpaCompliance for details.

More intuitive handling of id generator names

Previously when Hibernate encountered a @GeneratedValue in relation to an identifier, it would assume that there was a matching named generator annotation. For example, if an application specified @GeneratedValue(strategy=TABLE, name="abc") Hibernate would expect to see a @TableGenerator or a @org.hibernate.annotations.GenericGenerator with the same name. Which means that you’d often see mappings like:

@Entity
public class AnEntity {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy=SEQUENCE, name="MY_SEQ")
    @SequenceGenerator(name="MY_SEQ", sequenceName="MY_SEQ")
    public Long getId() {...}

    ...
}

The SequenceGenerator in the above example adds no additional information and is really completely unnecessary. So Hibernate now recognizes the following mapping in exactly the same way as the above mapping:

@Entity
public class AnEntity {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy=SEQUENCE, name="MY_SEQ")
    public Long getId() {...}

    ...
}

Vibur connection pool integration

The new hibernate-vibur module defines integration with the Vibur connection pool as a org.hibernate.engine.jdbc.connections.spi.ConnectionProvider implementation

Bugs, tasks, miscellaneous

  • Removed support for legacy HQL-style positional parameters

  • Added Travis CI support

  • Resume uploading Javadoc JARs to Maven

  • Deprecate Environment-scoped settings

  • Drop hibernate-infinispan module - relocated to org.infinispan:infinispan-hibernate-cache


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