Hibernate ORM 4.3.0.Beta2 was just released. The full changelog can be viewed here

This release includes several notable changes. Some of this will borrow from the 4.2.1 announcement:

• HHH-8141 Updated to Gradle 1.5. Improved multiple compile and build tasks in HHH-8142, HHH-8143, and HHH-8151

• ORM is now enforcing checkstyle within all modules. This was applied in HHH-8156. Violations were corrected in HHH-8159 and will continue to be corrected under HHH-8211 for 4.3.0.Beta3.

• HHH-8175 Official support for Postgresql 9.2, Postgres Plus 9.2, and IBM DB2 10.1. Luckily, these mostly worked out-of-the-box with our existing dialects. Only a few test changes were necessary.

• HHH-7797 (release 4.2.0 and 4.3.0.Beta1) changed the way uniqueness is handled. Rather than mixing "unique" on column definitions, "unique(columns...)" on table definitions, unique indexes, and unique constraints, all were changed to solely use unique constraints (DB2 is the exception -- indexes are use in certain circumstances). Follow-up issues were corrected in this release: HHH-8162 and HHH-8178.

• More details about HHH-8162: Since unique constraints are now the default, special handling was necessary within SchemaUpdate. The method used is configurable, selected with the "hibernate.schema_update.unique_constraint_strategy" property. DROP_RECREATE_QUIETLY is the default. It attempts to drop, then (re-)create each unique constraint within your model. All errors and exceptions (constraint doesn't exist, constraint already existed, etc.) are ignored. RECREATE_QUIETLY is the same, but does not attempt the drop. SKIP will not attempt to drop or create unique constraints at all on the SchemaUpdate.

• HHH-7617 Support for generating Eclipse IDE projects was improved. Please see this post for more info.

• HHH-8160 I forked Aries JPA and updated it for JPA 2.1. Feel free to use it as a test-bed for ORM 4.3.x: https://github.com/brmeyer/aries/tree/jpa21. The Aries team will hopefully move quickly to support JPA 2.1 once the spec is released.

• HHH-7944 Envers is now supported in OSGi.

• HHH-7943 improved the c3p0, proxool, ehcache, and infinispan strategies. All are now selectable in configurations by both classname and a short name. Further, their strategies were integrated as OSGi services. Note that HHH-7943 has multiple follow-on tickets due to classloader issues found with many of the 3rd party bundles.

• HHH-7993 supports basic OSGi Bundle scanning to automatically discover entities and mappings in your persistence unit bundle.

• HHH-8183 supports synonyms in schema validation. Enable the capability with the "hibernate.synonyms=true" property (disabled by default).

• HHH-8203 ensures support of Proxool 0.9.1.

• Deprecations: Hibernate's @ForeignKey in HHH-8170 (use JPA's @ForeignKey), @IndexColumn and @ListIndexBase in HHH-8163, and @Sort in HHH-8164 (use @SortNatural or @SortComparator)

JBoss Nexus: https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/org/hibernate
Maven Central: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/hibernate/hibernate-core (should update in a couple of days)
SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4
Downloads: 4.3.0.Beta2 ZIP, 4.3.0.Beta2 TGZ

Today we are happy to announce the 5.0.1.Final release of Hibernate Validator. In case you are wondering what happened with 5.0.0.Final - it has not gone missing. In fact it was released on the 11th of April.

The long story is, that we had to release 5.0.0.Final to meet the Java EE 7 release schedule. At the time the functionality was complete, but documentation was not. Given the amount of changes introduced by Bean Validation 1.1, we felt it was important to wait with the announcement of Hibernate Validator 5 until the documentation is up to scratch. That's the case with 5.0.1.Final. Not only does this release offer a complete Bean Validation 1.1 implementation it also includes an updated online documentation.

The highlights of Hibernate Validator 5 are (with pointers into the freshly baked documentation):

• Standardized method validation of parameters and return values. This has been a Hibernate Validator 4 specific functionality, but got now standardized as part of Bean Validation 1.1.
• Integration with Context and Dependency Injection (CDI). There are default ValidatorFactory and Validator instances available and you can now use @Inject in ConstraintValidator implementations out of the box. Requested custom implementations (via validation.xml) of resources like ConstraintValidatorFactory, MessageInterpolator, ParameterNameProvider or TraversableResolver are also provided as managed beans. Last but not least, the CDI integration offers transparent method validation for CDI beans.
• Group conversion
• Error message interpolation using EL expressions

We are also planning to create a little blog series introducing these new features in more detail. Stay tuned!

For now have a look at the Getting Started section of the documentation to see what you need to use Hibernate Validator 5. Naturally you will need the new Bean Validation 1.1 dependency, but you will also need an EL implementation - either provided by a container or added to your Java SE environment. Additional migration pointers can also be found in the Hibernate Validator migration guide.

You find the full release notes as usual on Jira. Maven artefacts are on the JBoss Maven repository under the GAV org.hibernate:hibernate-validator:5.0.1.Final and distribution bundles are available on SourceForge.

We are looking forward to get some feedback either on the Hibernate Validator forum or on stackoverflow using the hibernate-validator tag.

Enjoy!

Hibernate ORM 4.2.1.Final and 4.1.12.Final were just released. The full changelogs can be viewed here: 4.2.1.Final and 4.1.12.Final

Originally, 4.1.11 was slated to be the final release of 4.1.x. However, in HHH-8149, we reverted HHH-7797 for 4.1 (changed unique columns, keys, and constraints). The change had snowballed into numerous issues and, in hindsight, shouldn't have been made in 4.1.x to begin with. To clean things up, it was decided to release 4.1.12.

4.2.1 includes several notable changes:

• HHH-8175 Official support for Postgresql 9.2, Postgres Plus 9.2, and IBM DB2 10.1. Luckily, these mostly worked out-of-the-box with our existing dialects. Only a few test changes were necessary.

• As mentioned above, HHH-7797 (release 4.2.0) changed the way uniqueness is handled. Rather than mixing "unique" on column definitions, "unique(columns...)" on table definitions, unique indexes, and unique constraints, all were changed to solely use unique constraints (DB2 is the exception -- indexes are use in certain circumstances). The issues mentioned were corrected in this release: HHH-8092, HHH-8162, and HHH-8178.

• More details about HHH-8162: Since unique constraints are now the default, special handling was necessary within SchemaUpdate. The method used is configurable, selected with the "hibernate.schema_update.unique_constraint_strategy" property. DROP_RECREATE_QUIETLY is the default. It attempts to drop, then (re-)create each unique constraint within your model. All errors and exceptions (constraint doesn't exist, constraint already existed, etc.) are ignored. RECREATE_QUIETLY is the same, but does not attempt the drop. SKIP will not attempt to drop or create unique constraints at all on the SchemaUpdate.

• HHH-1904 In order to ensure that Hibernate does not generate foreign key and unique key names that are too long for certain dialects (ie, Oracle), the generation now uses random characters < 30 characters in length. Of course, this does not affect keys explicitly named in your mappings.

• HHH-7617 Support for generating Eclipse IDE projects was improved. Please see this post for more info.

• Our ClassLoader concepts for OSGi support were greatly improved by HHH-8096. In addition, HHH-7993 supports basic Bundle scanning to automatically discover entities and mappings in your persistence unit bundle.

• HHH-7714 added support for EntityMode.MAP in the JPA Criteria API.

• HHH-8183 supports synonyms in schema validation. Enable the capability with the "hibernate.synonyms=true" property (disabled by default).

• HHH-8203 ensures support of Proxool 0.9.1.

JBoss Nexus: https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/org/hibernate
Maven Central: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/hibernate/hibernate-core (should update in a couple of days)
SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4
Downloads: 4.2.1.Final ZIP, 4.2.1.Final TGZ, 4.1.12.Final ZIP, 4.1.12.Final TGZ

I am pleased to announce the release of Weld 2.0.0.Final, the reference implementation of Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE 1.1 (JSR 346). For a list of major changes in CDI 1.1 see the specification.

The reference implementation will soon be available in GlassFish 4 and WildFly (formerly JBoss Application Server). In the meantime you can check snapshots of the application servers.

As always, Weld artifacts can be obtained from maven or you can use a distribution bundle.

Along with the Weld release comes the final release of the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) for CDI 1.1. Martin Kouba did an excellent job writing new tests and keeping the TCK in sync with the almost never-ending stream of specification changes. The TCK splits the specification into 1550 testable assertions out of which 96.71% is covered by TCK tests.

I would like to thank to everyone who lent a hand and helped delivering these releases, especially: Martin Kouba, Pete Muir, Marko Lukša, Stuart Douglas, Marek Schmidt, Ron Šmeral, Tomáš Remeš, JJ Snyder, Phil Zampino, Tomaž Cerar, Hardy Ferentschik, Lincoln Baxter III, Matúš Abaffy and others.

[ Distribution (Weld, CDI TCK)] [ Documentation (Weld, CDI TCK)] [ Javadoc (CDI 1.1, Weld SPI)] [ Issue tracker]

The Hibernate Search 4.3 iteration reached its first milestone: version 4.3.0.Alpha1 is now available for download from Sourceforge.net and Maven repositories.

The theme for the 4.3 development cycle is clustering: we want to make it better, faster and easier to setup multiple nodes using Hibernate Search in both traditional bare-metal clusters and clouds. For now we're focusing on JGroups and Infinispan integrations but other contributions in the area are very welcome.

JGroups backend

Besides some minor bugfixes and improved logging messages, the big news is automatic master election.

Rather than having to setup some jgroupsSlave instances and a single jgroupsMaster instance with different configurations, you can now simply specify jgroups as backend on all your instances and they will elect a single master. The main benefit of this new feature is that when a master fails, it can automatically elect a new one; beware though the failover approach is still experimental and it won't - for one - cleanup stale locks the dead master could have left behind.

### backend configuration
hibernate.search.default.worker.backend = jgroups

Also we introduced some more configuration options for the power user: see the reference documentation for all details.

Updated JBoss modules

The JBoss Modules where updated to match JBoss EAP 6.1 and JBoss AS 7.2 (now renamed WildFly), and now also include the Infinispan Directory for easy usage of Infinispan when deploying in the application server.

The modules are availalble as a zip in Maven repositories, or can be downloaded from Sourceforge.net; more on how to use it is described in this section of the documentation.

Components upgraded

Many dependencies where upgraded, and integration points are now expecting the following versions:

• JBoss EAP 6.1
• Hibernate ORM 4.2.x
• JGroups 3.2.x
• Infinispan 5.2.x
• Lucene 3.6.x (this didn't actually change compared to Hibernate Search 4.2 but it's good to remind the version)

What's next?

In the next few weeks we will be working on better Infinispan integration: easier setup and more configuration examples. Also we have some open tasks about Spatial queries, especially the API needs some polishing.

The complete list of changes can be found on the JIRA release notes.

Links recap:

• Download it from Sourceforge or via Maven
• Get in touch on the forums or on the mailing list, or join us for a chat on IRC
• The issue tracker is JIRA and all code is on GitHub