We have just released 3.5.0-CR-2. The main focus for this release was bugfixes and documentation.

Please forgive the terseness of this entry. I am quite tired :)

Moving forward in the next 2 weeks we still have some documentation tasks to finish up and handle any bug reports that come back in to Jira. As we get closer to that time, we will decide whether 3.5.0.Next becomes 3.5.0-CR-3 or 3.5.0-Final.

I am pleased to announce that we have just released Hibernate version 3.5.0-CR-1. As a refresher, Hibernate follows the JBoss versioing scheme where CR is a Candidate for Release (what many of you might call RC). The main stated goal of 3.5 is JPA 2 compliance. This is the first release we believe achieves that goal entirely. In fact we are in the process of certifying for standalone JPA 2 compliance and have integrated this CR into the imminent JBoss AS M2 release as part of their effort towards full Java EE 6 compliance.

I'll blog more about the full set of changes in 3.5 when we tag 3.5.0 final release. The changes in this CR-1 represent mostly

• full support for derived identities (see the specification section 2.4.1 Primary Keys Corresponding to Derived Identities)
• wrapping up various loose ends

See the release notes for all the gory details.

The distribution bundles have been uploaded to SourceForge.

Please report any issues to Jira. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have a usage question.

Once again many people helped out with this release. I'd like to specifically mention Scott Marlow who not only did some coding but provided us the invaluable, and not to be underestimated, service of performing the standalone JPA TCK runs and analyzing the results. Thanks Scott and everyone else!

There have been numerous questions in regards to the following statement made in a few places on the Hibernate website:

Both Hibernate Annotations and Hibernate EntityManager are part of Hibernate Core as of 3.5.x...

So I wanted to clarify what is meant by that. Previously Hibernate Core, Hibernate Annotations and Hibernate EntityManager were all separate projects, meaning

• they lived in different Subversion projects
• they had independent release cycles (and hence independent versioning)
• they had different Jira projects
• they had different SubjectMatterExperts

Originally this split (initiate back in Hibernate's 3.0 days) was needed because back then Hibernate was on big source tree which needed to remain JDK 1.4 compliant. Nowadays though, with the modularization of the Hibernate (Core) build it became feasible to pull Annotations and EntityManager back into the same source project since each module can be built with different source and target JDK levels. The biggest win here from the user perspective I think is making the making of the "compatibility matrix" completely obsolete.

This does not mean that Annotations and EntityManager are part of the hibernate-core JAR file as far as the published maven repository artifacts are concerned. Hibernate is still modularized. The main reason for this is to isolate the dependences for each module. This makes it easy for users consuming Hibernate through a maven repo based dependency scheme (Maven, Ivy, Gradle, etc) to manage the transitive dependency tree.

In the distribution bundle (the archives uploaded to the SourceForge File Release System), however, the classes are all combined together into a single jar file. But this happens across all the modules (caching, etc) because that is how it was always done in these distribution bundles.

Hope that clarifies.

In terms of JPA 2, its really easier to start talking about things not yet implemented :) The set of missing features are defined by the unresolved subtasks of the following 2 Jira issues:

• http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-4190
• http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-4325

The still-to-be-implemented features are mainly certain aspects of derived identity support and support for embeddables with associations.

Check out the release details for the full list of changes.

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

As always, please report any issues to Jira and come visit us on IRC or the forums if you have a usage question.

We are getting so close folks! Great work.

Specific JPA 2 related enhancements from Beta-2 include:

• Complete criteria and JPAQL support
• Full metamodel API support, including StaticMetamodel support in conjunction with the Hibernate StaticMetamodel Generator Annotation Processor.
• Initial lock support, mostly what is missing/needed is verification of all the dialects
• Mostly complete JPA 2 mapping enhancements including @Access and full Map support.

Additional enhancements from Beta-2 include:

• Expanded and more consistent read-only support

Check out the release details for the full list of changes.

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

Please report any issues to Jira. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have a usage question.

A lot of effort from many folks went into this release and I'd like to thank everyone for all the bug reports, patches and development work that went into this.

Thanks!