In Relation To

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.

Earlier today I saw a transaction question targeted for a completely different audience pop up as the first headline news item on a well known java news site. Besides giving me and my colleagues a good laugh about bugs and transactions it also touched upon one of the questions that have given me a couple of free beers in bar bets and been mind-boggling for students during trainings. The question relates to the following (simplified) code:

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

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.

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.

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.