Hibernate ORM 5.6.0.Beta1 released

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We just released Hibernate ORM 5.6.0.Beta1; the 5.6.x series will be rather light on features as all stronger improvements are now reserved for versions 6+, but we’re starting a cleanup so to help you get prepared with the migration to six.

This is also a strategy to allow us to be more conservative with the patches we apply to 5.5 series, which we will maintain for longer like we do already with 5.3 and 5.4 but somewhat delaying backports of fixes to these branches, to give us all that extra level of confidence.

So what can you expect in 5.6 ?

Those of us who are not focusing exclusively on 6 are working on two main areas:

Hibernate Reactive, and the supporting changes needed in Hibernate ORM core.
Benchmarking and runtime performance improvements.

Such changes will regularly appear first in 5.6, then applied to 6 as well.

As always, bugfixes will appear in 5.6 first and taken in consideration for backporting as necessary.

Bye bye Javassist

To help people prepare the move to 6, and honestly also help us to start reducing the amount of maintained code, we’ll start already removing some long deprecated functionality.

The ability to use Javassist to perform bytecode enhancement was the first to bite the dust and is now removed.

The use of Byte Buddy has been the default since version 5.3, we then deprecated the use of Javassist as enhancer, and in this 5.6 release it was finally removed: just use Byte Buddy and you’ll be fine.

For those of you who aren’t fine with Byte Buddy… well I wish you had spoken up earlier, but even so open an issue and we’ll see what can be done.