In Relation To

It was almost a year ago that Mark Reinhold (one of the top Java engineers over at Sun/Oracle) announced The classpath is dead! at JavaONE, accompanied by a series of blog posts like this one, proclaiming that the future of Java is a modular one. In the mean time, the JDK 7 timeline has slipped dramatically and we may not see modules in Java proper until 2012 or later. All the while, the folks on JSR 294 have stalled, started, and stalled again, slowly inching their way towards a tightly-Java-integrated modularization standard, possibly requiring significant language, bytecode, and packaging changes to support it.

In Hibernate there is a particular branch of logic where we need to parse and validate an org.xml.sax.InputSource that might represent either a Hibernate mapping (hbm.xml) file, a 1.0-compliant orm.xml file or a 2.0-compliant orm.xml file. Now currently Hibernate mapping files are defined by a DTD and both versions of the orm.xml files by an XSD. Currently the code builds a SAXReader with DTD and Schema validation enabled and tries to read in the source. It first maps Schema validation to the 2.0 version of the XSD; if an error occurs it then tries re-parsing mapping Schema validation to 1.0 version of the XSD.

Very rarely do I find a tool that doesn't have some issue I have to workaround (even minor). Even more rarely do I find a tool that continues to impress me beyond what I thought I needed.

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:

I'm very pleased to say that we have released the first beta of Weld 1.1.0, the reference implementation of JSR-299: Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE. It's based on the CDI 1.0 API. You can find direct download links at the bottom of this post or you can pull the artifacts from the JBoss Maven Repository.

The final re-post to remind you to use the feeds from JBoss Tools to get JBoss tooling news ;)

Birmingham, UK. 9th August 2010

A few folks have been asking what the hell's happened to me, and I realized that I have not posted anything here for like 6 months. Well, the truth is, apart from recently becoming a father, I've been quite busy with a really exciting new project. And yeah, my head is full of a hundred interesting things I could blog about, but, unfortunately, the new project is super-duper secret for now, so I'll have to keep a lid on it until we're ready for an alpha release (perhaps another 6 months from now).