In Relation To

Some tooling originally lived inside the Hibernate ORM project itself. With the introduction of Eclipse dependencies, some part of it was split out into its own Hibernate Tools project. Pulling in the Eclipse platform as a dependency was not acceptable for ORM, so a separate project was the natural solution.

Later, when JBoss IDE (and eventually JBoss Tools) came into existence, the Eclipse-specific parts moved there, into the jbosstools-hibernate repository. What remained in the Hibernate Tools project was the reverse engineering engine and the Ant task. Maven and Gradle plugin support was added later on.

With the Eclipse tooling no longer being actively maintained as part of JBoss Tools, the original reason for the split, isolating Eclipse dependencies from ORM, no longer applies. Meanwhile, the remaining tools modules have always been tightly coupled to ORM: the reverse engineering engine depends directly on ORM internals, the build plugins need to stay in sync with the ORM version they target, and changed ORM features often require corresponding changes in the tools.

Maintaining all of this as a separate project meant coordinating releases across repositories, keeping versions aligned, and duplicating build infrastructure. In practice, a new ORM release always implied a matching Tools release.

Folding the tools back into ORM brings things full circle. The result: one repository, one release cycle, one set of coordinates. Contributors also benefit: a single pull request can now touch both the ORM core and the tooling that exposes it, making it easier to keep everything consistent.

The group ID changes from org.hibernate.tool to org.hibernate.orm. Here is the full mapping of old to new coordinates:

An important detail: the Maven and Gradle plugins have been merged with the existing ORM plugins. If you were already using hibernate-maven-plugin or hibernate-gradle-plugin for bytecode enhancement or other tasks, reverse engineering capabilities are now available directly from those same plugins. No additional dependency is needed.

There will be no relocation POMs for the old coordinates, in order to avoid the added maintenance cost. Please update your dependencies to the new coordinates directly.

The Eclipse-based tooling that was historically part of JBoss Tools is no longer maintained there. For many years these plugins provided a graphical way to configure and run reverse engineering, inspect mappings, and execute HQL queries directly from the IDE.

We have made an effort to extract the Hibernate-specific Eclipse plugins from the JBoss Tools infrastructure and turn them into a standalone project. The result lives at my personal GitHub repository. It builds in a very straightforward way using Maven and Tycho. No dependency on JBoss Tools build artifacts or update sites is needed. This should make it much easier to build, modify, and contribute to the Eclipse plugins compared to the old JBoss Tools setup.

However, there are currently no plans to make this an officially supported Hibernate project. The repository will be archived, but the code is there for anyone in the community who wants to pick it up and build upon it.

If you are currently relying on the Eclipse tooling, we recommend looking into the Maven or Gradle plugins as an alternative. They offer the same reverse engineering capabilities and integrate well with any IDE, since they are driven by your build system rather than by IDE-specific plugins.

The Hibernate Tools repository will continue to receive automated dependency upgrades on its older branches for a while, but will ultimately be archived and made read-only. All new development happens in the Hibernate ORM repository.

With the move to the ORM repository, issue tracking moves as well. New issues related to reverse engineering, the Ant task, or the build plugins for version 7.4 and later should be filed in the Hibernate ORM (HHH) project on Jira.

Open issues that are still relevant will be migrated from the Hibernate Tools (HBX) project to ORM. The Hibernate Tools project will remain available for reference and for issues pertaining to older versions prior to 7.4, but we will archive it and make it read-only.

Migrating is straightforward:

Your existing configuration files should continue to work as before. If you have custom code relying on Hibernate Tools as a library (e.g. a custom RevengStrategy), note that the Java package names have changed, for example, the public API moved from org.hibernate.tool.api to org.hibernate.tool.reveng.api. You will need to update your import statements accordingly.

For detailed documentation on reverse engineering via the build plugins, refer to the Hibernate ORM User Guide.

If you run into any issues during migration, or if you have suggestions for how we can improve the tooling going forward, feel free to reach out on the Hibernate forums.