Hibernate ORM version 5.3.0.Final has just been released.

JPA 2.2 Suppport

Hibernate ORM 5.3 implements support for JPA 2.2.

CDI-hosted AttributeConverters

Starting with JPA 2.1 applications may 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.

Applications would normally not access these services. Integrators however might want to use them to leverage Hibernate integration with these back-end containers. The BeanContainer can be accessed from the org.hibernate.resource.beans.spi.ManagedBeanRegistry which is a service that hides the repetitive details of dealing with BeanContainer based on Hibernate’s normal usage. ManagedBeanRegistry is a service and can be accessed from the SessionFactory’s ServiceRegistry.

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.

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.

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() {...}

    ...
}

Binary Compatibility

Hibernate version 5.2 introduced some unintented (as well as some intended) binary incompatiblities. Gail Badner did a great job identifying and categorizing these binary incompatibilities which led to a group of work to fix these unintended ones and to document the intended ones in the migration guide if not already. See HHH-12424 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.

Improved Memory Consumption

Improvements made under HHH-12556 and HHH-12558 can significantly reduce the amount of memory consumed by a Hibernate SessionFactory in many applications.

Additional Information


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