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And here comes Hibernate Validator 6.0 Final with Bean Validation 2.0 support

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It has been a long ride, more than six months, but here it is: we just released Hibernate Validator 6.0 Final together with the final version of the Bean Validation 2.0 specification.

What’s new since CR3?

For those who have followed closely the development of 6.0, here are the important changes since CR3:

  • Updated documentation

  • Updated translations

  • Performance improvements

  • Reduced memory footprint

  • Support for the latest JDK 9 (build 180)

The complete list of fixed issues can be found on our JIRA.

Why should I use this nifty new version?

We have some new features for you

First and foremost, Hibernate Validator 6.0 is the Reference Implementation of the Bean Validation 2.0 specification so it comes with all its new features:

  • First class support of container element constraints and cascaded validation (think private Map<@Valid @NotNull OrderCategory, List<@Valid @NotNull Order>> orderByCategories;);

  • Support for the new JSR 310 date/time data types for @Past and @Future;

  • New built-in constraints: @Positive, @PositiveOrZero, @Negative, @NegativeOrZero, @PastOrPresent and @FutureOrPresent;

We also have leveraged the new features of JDK 8 (built-in constraints are marked repeatable, parameter names are retrieved via reflection) as it is now the minimal version required.

You can read the whole story in the announcements of our Alpha, Beta and Candidate releases:

  • 6.0.0.Alpha1 in which we introduced nested container elements support and lambda based constraint definitions;

  • 6.0.0.Alpha2 with programmatic API and XML definition for container elements;

  • 6.0.0.Beta1 with metadata retrieving support for container elements;

  • 6.0.0.Beta2 with support for non generic container types in value extraction;

  • 6.0.0.CR1, 6.0.0.CR2 and 6.0.0.CR3 where we polished the features and the API.

It’s faster…​

We have done quite a lot of benchmarking and have significantly improved the performances of Hibernate Validator. It can be up to two times faster in various scenarios.

We’re going to publish the results of our benchmarks on this blog soon.

…​and it consumes less memory!

To do its magic, Hibernate Validator collects a lot of metadata on your constrained beans. After a report from the Keycloak developers, we worked on reducing the memory footprint used by the collected metadata.

Hibernate Validator should now consume significantly less memory than before to store your constrained beans' metadata.

Easy upgrade

The first thing you’ll notice is that the groupId of the artifact has changed: it is now org.hibernate.validator (we added validator at the end to better compartimentalize the various Hibernate technologies).

Other than that, it will probably just be a drop-in replacement if you didn’t use experimental features.

If you used the old value handling infrastructure to deal with custom containers, you need to migrate them to the new value extractor infrastructure.

The detailed list of potential migration concerns can be found in our migration guide.

If you want to benefit from the new features of this version on WildFly, we also provide WildFly patches for WildFly 10.1 and WildFly 11.0 Alpha1. You can read about how to apply such patches here.

It sounds exciting, how can I help?

First, test it with your applications and report any issues you might encounter.

Then, if you’d like, you can test the new features (the new constraints, the new container element support…​). If you have any issues with the features or the documentation, please report it to us.

Finally, we added a few more built-in constraints in Bean Validation 2.0 and Hibernate Validator 6.0 so we need to update the translations.

English, French, German, Persian, Ukrainian and Brazilian Portuguese are covered but any help on the others are welcome. Just take a look at the translations in our GitHub repository and create a PR (if you’re not aware on how to encode a property file, just push it to us in plain text and we’ll do it).

Getting 6.0.1.Final

To get the release with Maven, Gradle etc. use the GAV coordinates org.hibernate.validator:{hibernate-validator|hibernate-validator-cdi|hibernate-validator-annotation-processor}:6.0.1.Final. Note that the group id has changed from org.hibernate (Hibernate Validator 5 and earlier) to org.hibernate.validator (from Hibernate Validator 6 onwards).

Alternatively, a distribution bundle containing all the bits is provided on SourceForge (TAR.GZ, ZIP).

What about 6.0.0.Final?

6.0.0.Final essentially is the version submitted to the JCP as the Reference Implementation of Bean Validation 2.0. We made quite a lot of improvements on top of it during the Final Approval Ballot period so we decided to release 6.0.1.Final with all these improvements right away.

What’s next?

Well, first, we will get some rest and wait for your feedback on this version.

With your help, we hope to release a new version soon with updated translations.

And finally, we also intend to explore potential features for a future spec revision. Always good to have feedback from the field before setting the API in stone.

Feedback, issues, ideas?

To get in touch, use the usual channels:

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