The first edition of Hibernate in Action has spread quite successfully. On training or consulting somewhere on-site I often see people with a copy on their desk. And it has proven to be invaluable to me (and others at JBoss) bringing a few copies along every-time. There is simply no better additional training material than a professionally edited full-length book. The only downside is that it is only covering Hibernate 2.x.
Soon after the release of Hibernate in Action about a year ago we thought about an update. After all, development on Hibernate3 had already started and we knew that interesting stuff would happen in EJB3 persistence as well. I've mentioned a second edition a few times on the forum but we haven't been very specific about release dates and new or updated content - hence this blog entry to keep everybody up-to-date. The reason why we were quiet for some time is that we simply had to finish Hibernate3 first, an effort that was completed only a few months ago. But also the EJB3 specification and its influence on Hibernate had to be watched before we could start updating the book. Since Hibernate 3.0 is now long stable and even 3.1 is already on the horizon, and with EJB 3.0 available in public draft, we can continue updating the manuscript for Hibernate in Action, Second Edition.
I guess most of you first want to know when it is going to be available. Both Hibernate 3.1 and
EJB 3.0 are being finalized (despite the current alpha tag on Hibernate 3.1, it's soon feature
complete and not a big
release anyway) but some things might still change. Usually these minor
changes have not much impact on development but can make whole sections of documentation obsolete.
After discussing the issue with our editor and publisher at Manning, we think that the updated
edition can be available end of September 2005, or early in Q4. As always, the eBook edition
might be available earlier than the print version.
We'll update the book for Hibernate3 and EJB3, and based on the feedback we got from readers and during training (our first Hibernate training last year was following the books structure) we'll make some major changes:
- the
Toolset
chapter will be removed and integrated into a new beginners tutorial that also shows the new Eclipse-based and Ant tools, with a hands-on basic project setup
- a new chapter will be added with best practices, patterns, and general tips & tricks - this will include a lot of FAQs from the forum and our customers, such as caching tricks, metadata-driven applications, dealing with large values, complex deployment scenarios, etc.
- more illustrations will be included with many mapping examples
So, you can expect quite a lot of new content, especially wrt EJB3 API usage for all of you who want to learn the new interfaces and lifecycle (it's easy if you know Hibernate...) and more best practices.
We also have an updated version of CaveatEmptor for the second edition. I've packaged an alpha release you can already download . It includes a complete mapping of the domain model with EJB3/Hibernate3 annotations and ready-to-run EJB3 persistence unit tests in straightforward J2SE, using Hibernate EntityManager and Hibernate Annotations .
I'll keep you updated here and release new versions of CaveatEmptor as I work on the manuscript.
P.S. Don't miss the new EJB3 TrailBlazer tutorial for the JBoss EJB3 Application Server and send feedback to the expert group on the public draft .
