In Relation To

Don't miss the Seam webinar on December 7 at 1PM EST. Enrol here .

Annotations are undoubtedly the coolest new thing in Java SE 5 and will deeply change the way we write Java code. In the process of designing EJB 3.0, Hibernate Validator and Seam, we've had a chance to really start to stretch the use of annotations to the limit. It's striking just how many kinds of things may be expressed more elegantly and efficiently in declarative mode when you have a facility for mixing declaration and logic into the same source file. We've seen that in practice, whatever initial misgivings people may have about Java annotations, once they actually start using something like EJB 3.0 in a real project, they experience such a productivity increase that they quickly become comfortable with the approach.

One of the distinctive features of Seam is that a lot more things are treated as components than what you might be used to from other architectures. In fact, pretty much every object you write will be treated as a Seam component.

We released Seam today.

JBoss, Inc is looking to hire a full-time Hibernate consultant based in the United States to help deliver Hibernate-related onsite consulting and training. We're looking for someone with significant experience building enterprise applications using Hibernate. JBoss knowledge is useful but not essential. Please send resumes to gavin@hibernate.org.

I recently spoke at TheServerSideJavaSymposium and at the New England JUG. My presentations, which cover some new ideas implemented in Hibernate 3.0 are now online:

For several months, Versant, an old-school OODBMS vendor with a collapsing market cap, has been making any number of false claims about Hibernate in online webinars and sales presentations. I went so far as to write a blog refuting their claims, but then held back on publishing it because I thought they didn't deserve the attention. They've now resorted to mass emailings of a document with many false claims about Hibernate, and we've decided we need to respond for the record.

We got dissed by a Spring developer!

Hibernate 3.0 is the world's most sophisticated ORXM (Object/Relational/XML Mapping) solution. Hibernate3 makes it easier than ever before for Java applications to interact with persistent data, allowing a single definition of the transformation between various in-memory representations of the entity data and the relational schema, even in the case of very complex legacy schemas and schemas for historical data or data with visibility rules. Hibernate3 also provides the most comprehensive object/relational query functionality, with three full-featured query facilities: Hibernate Query Language, the newly enhanced Hibernate Criteria Query API, and enhanced support for queries expressed in the native SQL dialect of the database.

Cedric beat me to this, but if you missed his announcement, the EJB 3.0 second early draft is available. The most interesting new stuff to me is: