In Relation To

One of the things in Hibernate in Action that needs serious improvement is the section about data access objects, the good old DAO pattern.

As promised, a current snapshot of my work on Hibernate in Action, second edition. The CaveatEmptor alpha2 release has some quite interesting new examples:

A new updated version of the Hibernate Tools (http://tools.hibernate.org) project have been made available.

Packaging has always been a manual operation in ORM world. In Hibernate, you have to list the mapped entities either through the configuration API or through the hibernate.cfg.xml file. For a while now, JBoss AS has introduced the notion of .har, basically an archive scanned by the deployer to discover the Hibernate configuration and the hbm.xml files in it.

New releases of both Hibernate Entity Manager and Hibernate Annotations are available.

As I mentioned in my previous blog about Bulk Operations , both UPDATE and DELETE statements are challenging to handle against single entities contained across multiple tables (not counting associations), which might be the case with:

The EJB3 persistence specification calls for implementors to support Bulk Operations in EJB-QL (the EJB Query Language). As part of Hibernate's implementation of EJB3 persistence, HQL (the Hibernate Query Language : which is a superset of EJB-QL) needed to support these Bulk Operations. This support is now code complete, even going beyond what is offered in the EJB3 persistence specification. There is one task outstanding against this bulk operation support in HQL, but this is completely beyond the scope of the support called for in the EJB3 persistence specification. I'll blog about this one later as it simply rocks ;)

The first edition of Hibernate in Action has spread quite successfully. On training or consulting somewhere on-site I often see people with a copy on their desk. And it has proven to be invaluable to me (and others at JBoss) bringing a few copies along every-time. There is simply no better additional training material than a professionally edited full-length book. The only downside is that it is only covering Hibernate 2.x.

The new updated version of the Hibernate Tools (http://tools.hibernate.org) project includes significant updates to the Eclipse editors, plugings, and wizards, as well as a unified and convenient Ant task for integration of the tools in your regular builds.

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.