In Relation To

New to Hibernate 3.0.1 is the SessionFactory.getCurrentSession() method. It allows application developers to delegate tracking of current sessions to Hibernate itself. This is fairly trivial functionality, but stuff just about any user of Hibernate had to implement themselves, or rely on third party stuff to do for them. Let's take a look at how this is implemented in Hibernate and how it might be useful.

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:

We just released the brand new Hibernate Annotations module as an alpha version. This module provides the Hibernate facilities to declare Hibernate O/R mapping metadata through JDK 5.0 metadata annotations (instead of XML mapping files or XDoclet preprocessing). We have implemented the EJB3 (JSR-220) O/R metadata annotations defined in the early draft 1 of the spec. This set of annotations covers all common mappings cases.

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.

It happens sometimes that a domain model objet dettached from a previous session needs/can be reattached without trigging an UPDATE (whether it has optimistic locking or not). Hibernate supports this kind of feature by providing: