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First Alpha release of Hibernate Validator 5

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Good news for all of you waiting for an early version of Hibernate Validator 5 in order to experiment with the new Bean Validation 1.1 (JSR 349) features. Hibernate Validator 5.0.0.Alpha1 is now available for download in the JBoss Maven Repository under the GAV org.hibernate:hibernate-validator:5.0.0.Alpha1 or via SourceForge.

The focus of the release was the alignment of Hibernate Validator with the first early draft of Bean Validation 1.1 (1.1.0.Alpha1). The Hibernate Validator changelog circles for this reason around HV-571 which served as placeholder for those specification changes. Of course the biggest change was the formalization of method validation, but there are other interesting new features as well. For example:

  • In conjunction with method validation it is worth having a look at the ParameterNameProvider interface which helps to identify the parameter of a failing parameter constraint in the resulting ConstraintViolation. The Path API was also extended to provide additional meta information about a failing constraint. You can get the element descriptor via Path.Node#getElementDescriptor (of course you need to iterate to the leaf node of first). The element discriptors themselves got extended by ConstructorDescriptor, MethodDescriptor, ParameterDescriptor and ReturnValueDescriptor.
  • Support for container injection in ConstraintValidator. Check out the new life cycle methods ValidatorFactory#close and ConstraintValidatorFactory#releaseInstance in this context.
  • Expose settings defined in XML in the Configuration API. Refer to the new interface javax.validation.ConfigurationSource, but be aware that there is a follow up issue (BVAL-292) as well.

The easiest way to find out more about these new interfaces and classes is to have a look at the Hibernate Validator test suite where you will find tests for all the mentioned new features.

There are more proposals which are still under active discussion. Feel free to contribute :-)

Given that this is an early draft there will be further changes to the API. For this reason Hibernate Validator 5.0.0.Alpha1 is not a production release. On the other hand, for integrators and tool developers it makes a lot of sense to have an early evaluation to see whether we are on the right track.

Enjoy!

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