Bean Validation's public draft has now been approved by the EC (all members voting yes except Nortel and SpringSource who did not vote).
But we have not stopped there!
Reference implementation
We are pleased to release the first alpha of the Bean Validation Reference Implementation: Hibernate Validator 4 Alpha (download).
This is a big milestone and the core features are already present and the implementation is already used in the JSF 2.0 RI prototype. This release is not feature complete though, here are the main missing parts:
- Group inheritance using interfaces or implicit grouping
- Group sequence is implemented but not fully tested
- Overriding the Default group of a class is not implemented yet
- TraversableResolver does not integrates with JPA yet
- XML configuration (META-INF/validation.xml)
- XML mapping
- some metadata APIs are not fully compliant
- ConstraintValidatorContext is not operational
The distribution includes source code, jars and a getting started guide.
Everything should work as described in the spec otherwise. For help, come to our forum. Please file bugs to JIRA. For more informations on Hibernate Validator 4, see here. Many thanks to Hardy for leading the effort and to Alaa and Gunnar for stepping up.
Specification
This implementation is based on the specification 1.0 Beta3[1] (post public draft). This version improves:
- the bootstrap API names are much more intuitive
- type-safe validator implementations: a constraint is attached to several validators, the right one being chosen based on the targeted type
- XML configuration via META-INF/valiation.xml
- XML constraint mapping (allowing annotation overriding)
Give us feedback and tell us how it goes.
