We just released Hibernate 3.0 beta 1. I've no time to list all the many changes since the alpha was released four months ago, let alone everything that is new in Hibernate3, which has been in development for over a year now.
The most exciting new thing from our point of view is the new AST-based HQL parser, written by Joshua Davis. It uses 3 ANTLR grammars to transform HQL/EJBQL to SQL. The work on this is not quite finished, but almost all legacy tests pass. You can try out the new query parser by setting
hibernate.query.factory_class=org.hibernate.hql.ast.ASTQueryTranslatorFactor
I'll try to get Joshua to blog about the design of the parser (very cool stuff).
