In Relation To

The Hibernate developer team released Hibernate 3.2.0 GA today, this release is now ready for production use. Please read the migration guidelines if you are upgrading from an earlier version.

People using the Criteria API have either transparently or knowingly used a ResultTransformer . A ResultTransformer is a nice and simple interface that allows you to transform any Criteria result element. E.g. you can make any Criteria result be returned as a java.util.Map or as a non-entity Bean.

A bug report was recently opened in Hibernate's JIRA stating that Hibernate incorrectly handles deadlock scenarios. The basis for the report was an example in the /Pro Hibernate 3/ book (Chapter 9). For those perhaps not familiar with the term deadlock, the basic gist is that two processes each hold resource locks that the other needs to complete processing. While this phenomena is not restricted to databases, in database terms the idea is that the first process (P1) holds a write lock on a given row (R1) while the second process (P2) holds a write lock on another row (R2). Now, to complete its processing P1 needs to acquire a write lock on R2, but cannot do so because P2 already holds its write lock. Conversely, P2 needs to acquire a write lock on R1 in order to complete its processing, but cannot because P1 already holds its write lock. So neither P1 nor P2 can complete its processing because each is indefinitely waiting on the other to release the needed lock, which neither can do until its processing is complete. The two processes are said to be deadlocked in this situation.

Hibernate 3.1.1 has been released earlier this week. This maintenance release focused on bugfixes and improvements, especially regarding:

Over the past few months we have been adding some simplifications to the way you can use and specify native sql queries in Hibernate. Gavin even blogged about some of them earlier , but I thought it were about time we brought some more news on this blog about it.

Steve just committed a new interface and extension point to Hibernate Core. We can finally plug-in custom Session context management into Hibernate. For those of you who already know getCurrentSession() in Hibernate 3.0, this new extension enables the same without a JTA environment.

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:

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.

We just released Hibernate 3.0 beta 1. I've no time to list all the many changes since the alpha was released four months ago, let alone everything that is new in Hibernate3, which has been in development for over a year now.

One of the joys of working on an open source project with commercial competitors is having to implement features that our users simply don't ask for, and probably won't use in practice, just because those competitors try to spin their useless features as a competitive advantage. We realized ages ago that it's really hard to tell people that they don't need and shouldn't use a feature if you don't have it.