In Relation To

Today we have released both 3.5.6-Final and 3.6.0.CR1.

Andy Glover wrote an excellent article about Hibernate Shards a few weeks ago. (It seems we missed linking to it here.)

I have recently posted about the ability to use Bean Validation with various presentation technologies (here and there). Now Flex is part of the family. The good guys at GraniteDS have added support for Bean Validation into their project and hence Bean Validation is usable by all Flex users.

It was almost a year ago that Mark Reinhold (one of the top Java engineers over at Sun/Oracle) announced The classpath is dead! at JavaONE, accompanied by a series of blog posts like this one, proclaiming that the future of Java is a modular one. In the mean time, the JDK 7 timeline has slipped dramatically and we may not see modules in Java proper until 2012 or later. All the while, the folks on JSR 294 have stalled, started, and stalled again, slowly inching their way towards a tightly-Java-integrated modularization standard, possibly requiring significant language, bytecode, and packaging changes to support it.

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.

Very rarely do I find a tool that doesn't have some issue I have to workaround (even minor). Even more rarely do I find a tool that continues to impress me beyond what I thought I needed.

Hibernate 3.6.0.Beta4 has been released incorporating mostly minor bugfixes and improvements. Most of the work this cycle went into the improved documentation. For those not aware we are planning on splitting the documentation into 2 books: