In Relation To

Hibernate has moved to Git (hosted on GitHub) for source control. That has been well documented. I wanted describe the approach Hibernate takes to branching, versioning and releasing as it is something that has come up a number of times, even prior to the move to Git.

Hibernate 4 (master branch on GitHub) has been switched to use Gradle for its builds. Mainly I just liked the alliteration of Git and Gradle... :)

Yyou probably don't know it yet but Hibernate Core and Hibernate Validator source code is now on Git and Hibernate Search and co will likely follow very soon. There are various reasons for the move but to summarize it, life was not bad under SVN but it's really great under Git.

In Hibernate there is a particular branch of logic where we need to parse and validate an org.xml.sax.InputSource that might represent either a Hibernate mapping (hbm.xml) file, a 1.0-compliant orm.xml file or a 2.0-compliant orm.xml file. Now currently Hibernate mapping files are defined by a DTD and both versions of the orm.xml files by an XSD. Currently the code builds a SAXReader with DTD and Schema validation enabled and tries to read in the source. It first maps Schema validation to the 2.0 version of the XSD; if an error occurs it then tries re-parsing mapping Schema validation to 1.0 version of the XSD.

The JPA 2 metamodel is the cornerstone of type-safe criteria queries in JPA 2. The generated classes allow you to refer to entity properties using static field references, instead of strings. (A metamodel class is the fully-qualified class name of the entity class it matches followed by an underscore (_)).

The goal of this blog post is to walk you through an Java EE 6 application from a simple, static web page until we have a full blown stack that consist of the stuff in the list below. I'm calling this stack Summer because after a long, hard winter Spring may be nice but boy, wait until Summer kicks in ;-)

As a follow up to http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/SimultaneouslySupportingJDBC3AndJDBC4WithMaven, I wanted to point out that I uploaded some example projects to the design discussion. There are 2 different approaches as Maven projects and one Gradle project.

Per HHH-2412 and its design discussion I have been working on supporting JDBC4 in Hibernate. Initially I had planned on adding this in 3.6, but now leaning toward 3.5 Anyway, as outlined on the design wiki, I initially thought to add this support as separate modules. However, I quickly came to the realization that using separate modules would actually require users make an explicit choice wrt an extra jar. Especially considering that I could make Hibernate code make this determination programatically, I really did not like that aspect to using modules here. So I started looking for alternatives.

Let me preface this by saying up front that, yes, I am fed up with Maven. In the 2 years since I decided to switch Hibernate over to use Maven for its build tool I don't think that Maven has lived up to making builds any easier. Quite the contrary, in fact. Previously though there was not really been any other option. At that time ant/ivy combo was just starting to gain traction. Not to mention that I do like the notion of build-by-convention which Ant just does not provide.