Last night the modern JakartaEE server WildFly released the 13th version and among the list of enhancements you can find an update to all included Hibernate libraries.
Actually it includes both sets of old and new versions of Hibernate libraries!
WildFly 13, like version 12, aims at JavaEE 7 certification so if you start it via its default configuration you will get the old set of Hibernate libraries: Hibernate ORM 5.1.x to implement the JPA 2.1 specification, the older matching Hibernate Search, and the old Hibernate Validator providing the Bean Validation 1.1 implementation.
The full JavaEE 8 server is expected to be implemented by WildFly 14 - however the version released today can give you a taste of most of the EE8 implementations already by enabling a flag:
./standalone.sh -Dee8.preview.mode=true
Especially if you don’t care about an all-or-nothing approach and are good with having a combination of some specifications at EE7 and some others at EE8, this means you can start benefiting from the new features today!
New Hibernate versions in the "EE8 Preview Mode"
When enabling the ee8.preview.mode=true property, rather than the old stack your applications will get the latest Hibernate libraries, freshly released just some days ago.
- Hibernate ORM 5.3.1.Final
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Implements JPA 2.2, and a whole lot of improvements across the board: new features, enhanced performance.
- Hibernate Search 5.10.1.Final
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While the main reason to update it is to align dependencies with Hibernate ORM, it implies lots of improvements as we jump from versions
5.5to5.10. In particular Hibernate Search now features Elasticsearch integration. This integration is not included in WildFly but can be easily added - we’ll follow up with detailed instructions soon. - Hibernate Validator 6.0.10.Final
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Reference implementation of the Bean Validation 2.0 specification, bringing among other features container element constraints and massive performance improvements.
Your help is needed!
While we’re very excited that WildFly users can finally benefit from the result of the last few years of work of the Hibernate community, we’re not off the hook yet:
enabling the ee8.preview.mode=true switch is clearly meant to be a preview.
We’ve been working hard to make it easy to update existing applications to the latest Hibernate versions: please follow the respective migration guides for the essential steps, yet if you end up having trouble please let us know!
You can ask on the new forums, or create an issue on JIRA. If you could check for existing and similar issues to avoid duplicates and provide details / reproducers / a test that’s incredibily helpful!
