Hibernate 3.6.0.Beta4 has been released incorporating mostly minor bugfixes and improvements. Most of the work this cycle went into the improved documentation. For those not aware we are planning on splitting the documentation into 2 books:

1. a Getting Started Guide, see HHH-5441 : this is a collection of tutorials and information on the Hibernate community, etc.
2. a Developer Guide, see HHH-5466 : this is essentially the information from the existing manual, but presented in a more topical fashion.

The Getting Started Guide is mostly done. There is a single subtask outstanding to incorporate a tutorial on basic Envers usage, but it already contains tutorials on basic Hibernate using (both with hbm.xml and annotation usage) as well as a basic JPA usage tutorial. They all build on the same schema and domain classes, in hopes it will be useful illustrating how to move from one paradigm to another. In fact they all perform the exact same steps for illustration (except for the Envers tutorial when it gets done, since it need to present a very different use case to usefully show Envers usage).

We also are trying out actually bundling up the tutorials in a working project this time (a maven mutli-module project) to make it even easier to get up and running with the tutorials. We are still working through the details of hosting that in terms of referencing the zip from the tutorials (thats the problem with modularizing stuff). Anyway, in the interm I thought this one was close enough that I went ahead and made it available from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/index.html. Some notes:

• This url is only made available temporarily
• The documentation references a link to obtain the code. That link is not accurate. We are still deciding where these will live and how they will be referenced. In the meantime I have zipped up the code and made it available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/tutorials.tar.gz (again temporarily).

See http://hibernate.org/downloads.html for details on obtaining the release. Or try http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/index.html#hibernate-gsg-obtain ;)

Please report any issues to JIRA. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have usage questions.

Kind of knew people would ask about this... So why did we decide to deprecate CGLIB support in Hibernate? First I want to point out that Hibernate and CGLIB have a very long history (and a largely good history) in terms of working together. This is not an indictment against any of the CGLIB developers. They are good guys and as I stated above for many years Hibernate and CGLIB have worked well together.

The simple fact of the matter is that development on CGLIB has largely stopped. It happens. Developers for whatever reason (the reasons are their own) move on to new priorities.

The fact that development on CGLIB had even slowed initially came to my attention about 4 years ago in regards to HHH-2222. The problem described in the JIRA issue itself was not the concern; the concern was that the fix was simply a release of CGLIB 2.2 using the updated ASM library. That 2.2 release was over a year in coming.

More recently we have had issues with CGLIB in regards to signed jars as well as its handling of bytecode enhancement for annotated entities. The Hibernate team have submitted patches (to the best of our ability) to CGLIB for each of these issues we have found without even a response.

So it really comes down to a decision as to whether we want to get into maintaining a fork of CGLIB for Hibernate where we can fix stuff as we need. But that is not our core competency and we already have integration with another great bytecode library in Javassist. So I decided it was just time to move on.

BytecodeProvder, as an SPI, will remain intact so users are free to continue to use CGLIB as the bytecode provider for Hibernate. We just will not maintain the integration anymore.

Today we have released both 3.5.5 and 3.6.0.Beta3.

3.5.5

This is a maintenance release fixing mostly minor bugs. Changes of note include:

• HHH-5426 - HQL update/delete does not invalidate the query cache
• HHH-5451 - deprecation of CGLIB as a bytecode provider
• Numerous Changes in behavior of ResultTransformers

For more details about 3.5.5, including the full list of changes, see the release page.

The artifacts have all been published to the JBoss Maven repository. Please note that there is a change as of this release in that we no longer deploy irrelevant modules to the repository; see HHH-5438 for details.

The release bundles have been uploaded to SourceForge.

3.6.0.Beta3

3.6.0.Beta3 builds on the work from 3.6.0.Beta2 as well as from 3.5.5 Changes of particular interest include:

• HHH-5300 - Configurable QueryPlanCache reference counts (Manuel Dominguez Sarmiento)
• HHH-5485 - Change in DTD hosting
• HHH-5441, HHH-5466 - Initial work on documentation changes

For more details about 3.6.0.Beta3, including the full list of changes, see the release page.

The artifacts have all been published to the JBoss Maven repository. Please note that there is a change as of this release in that we no longer deploy irrelevant modules to the repository; see HHH-5438 for details.

The release bundles have been uploaded to SourceForge.

Please report any issues using Jira. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have usage questions.

The Hibernate team is happy to announce the availability of the 3.6.0.Beta2 release. The major change from Beta1 is the merging of AnnotationConfiguration into Configuration (HHH-5375). AnnotationConfiguration is now completely deprecated.

Additionally a lot of work went into the initial effort of merging the previous annotations reference manual into the main reference manual. The docs are in an OK enough state that I felt more comfortable uploading them to the docs server:

• Javadocs (aggregate)
• Core Reference Guide
• Hibernate EntityManager Guide
• Envers Reference Guide

A lot more work will be going into the docs for 3.6.

For more details about 3.6.0.Beta2, including the full list of changes, see the release page.

The artifacts have all been published to the JBoss Maven repository. The release bundles have been uploaded to SourceForge.

Please report any issues using Jira. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have usage questions.

The Hibernate team is happy to announce the availability of both the 3.5.4 and 3.6.0.Beta1 releases.

3.5.4

This is a maintenance release fixing quite a number of mostly minor bugs. Some fixes of particular interest are:

• HHH-4240, HHH-4250 : improved support for joined inheritance
• HHH-5329 : fixes a regression that stopped 3.5.3 from being usable in JDK 1.4 environments

For more details about 3.5.4, including the full list of changes, see the release page.

The artifacts have all been published to the JBoss Maven repository. You can find out more about the JBoss Maven repository here.

The release bundles have been uploaded to SourceForge.

3.6.0.Beta1

3.6 introduces some new features as well as incorporating most of the fixes from 3.5. Changes of particular interest include

• Dropping support for JDK 1.4
• merging some modules into core; specifically hibernate-jmx and hibernate-annotations
• repackaging of classes in hibernate-testing
• HHH-2277 : fixes a long known limitation in key-many-to-one support.
• HHH-5138, HHH-5182, HHH-5262 : collectively address a number of improvements to the Hibernate type system. See the newly separated and expanded chapter on Types in the reference manual for details.
• HHH-5268 : java.util.UUID support

For more details about 3.6.0.Beta1, including the full list of changes, see the release page.

The artifacts have all been published to the JBoss Maven repository. You can find out more about the JBoss Maven repository here.

The release bundles have been uploaded to SourceForge.

Please report any issues using Jira. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have usage questions.