I'm happy to announce the release of IronJacamar 1.1.0.Beta5.

Full release notes are here.

Security inflow

We have finished up our security inflow model for our WorkManager, which allows you to configure mapping of users and groups in the Enterprise Information System domain to the domain used in the application server.

If you have additional use-cases that isn't covered by the existing configuration schemas let us know.

Improvements, improvements, and more improvements

This release really aims to finish up the work left on IronJacamar 1.1, so you will see a lot of small / bigger improvements in most of our components, like

• Listener SPI for datasource connections
• Make it possible to test a connection using CRI/Subject
• Improved reauthentication pool
• Additional statistics for the pools
• Improvements to our code generator
• Improvements to our WebLogic converter

And a ton of bug fixes. So, all in all, a release that should make you say Yummi !.

The Road Ahead

We aim to submit this release for inclusion in WildFly, and we further hope that this will be the last Beta release in the 1.1 series. So now is the time people if you are looking for something in the Java EE Connector Architecture space !

For Those About to Rock, We Salute You !

[WebSite] [Download] [Documentation] [JIRA] [Forum]

Recently I had the chance to give a talk on Bean Validation 1.1 at Berlin Expert Days (BED-Con), a nice mid-sized conference (2 days, 500 attendees) hosted at Freie Universität in Berlin. As in the last years, BED-Con was a great experience with awesome people and many insightful talks in the fields of Java EE, NoSQL, Continuous Delivery etc. I really can recommend this event which is planned to take place next year again.

My talk on Bean Validation went very well and I got lots of questions on the new functionality. In particular the possibility to use constraints on method parameters and return values (method validation) seems to be a helpful feature for many. You can find my slides which discuss the new features on the conference web site (in German, though).

I also used the opportunity to listen to some talks around client side web applications using HTML 5 and REST. There's a lot of activity going on in this field right now, and it appears like a new framework is released every day.

An interesting question to me is how Bean Validation as Java based technology fits into this picture. Bean Validation provides an API for retrieving constraint meta-data from models which could be used to perform a client-side validation of data entered by the user. It would surely be interesting to see how this could be leveraged to expose constraint meta-data e.g. via a REST service and use it on the client with frameworks such as AngularJS. Maybe this is even done by some frameworks already?

Hibernate ORM 4.3.0.Beta2 was just released. The full changelog can be viewed here

This release includes several notable changes. Some of this will borrow from the 4.2.1 announcement:

• HHH-8141 Updated to Gradle 1.5. Improved multiple compile and build tasks in HHH-8142, HHH-8143, and HHH-8151

• ORM is now enforcing checkstyle within all modules. This was applied in HHH-8156. Violations were corrected in HHH-8159 and will continue to be corrected under HHH-8211 for 4.3.0.Beta3.

• HHH-8175 Official support for Postgresql 9.2, Postgres Plus 9.2, and IBM DB2 10.1. Luckily, these mostly worked out-of-the-box with our existing dialects. Only a few test changes were necessary.

• HHH-7797 (release 4.2.0 and 4.3.0.Beta1) changed the way uniqueness is handled. Rather than mixing "unique" on column definitions, "unique(columns...)" on table definitions, unique indexes, and unique constraints, all were changed to solely use unique constraints (DB2 is the exception -- indexes are use in certain circumstances). Follow-up issues were corrected in this release: HHH-8162 and HHH-8178.

• More details about HHH-8162: Since unique constraints are now the default, special handling was necessary within SchemaUpdate. The method used is configurable, selected with the "hibernate.schema_update.unique_constraint_strategy" property. DROP_RECREATE_QUIETLY is the default. It attempts to drop, then (re-)create each unique constraint within your model. All errors and exceptions (constraint doesn't exist, constraint already existed, etc.) are ignored. RECREATE_QUIETLY is the same, but does not attempt the drop. SKIP will not attempt to drop or create unique constraints at all on the SchemaUpdate.

• HHH-7617 Support for generating Eclipse IDE projects was improved. Please see this post for more info.

• HHH-8160 I forked Aries JPA and updated it for JPA 2.1. Feel free to use it as a test-bed for ORM 4.3.x: https://github.com/brmeyer/aries/tree/jpa21. The Aries team will hopefully move quickly to support JPA 2.1 once the spec is released.

• HHH-7944 Envers is now supported in OSGi.

• HHH-7943 improved the c3p0, proxool, ehcache, and infinispan strategies. All are now selectable in configurations by both classname and a short name. Further, their strategies were integrated as OSGi services. Note that HHH-7943 has multiple follow-on tickets due to classloader issues found with many of the 3rd party bundles.

• HHH-7993 supports basic OSGi Bundle scanning to automatically discover entities and mappings in your persistence unit bundle.

• HHH-8183 supports synonyms in schema validation. Enable the capability with the "hibernate.synonyms=true" property (disabled by default).

• HHH-8203 ensures support of Proxool 0.9.1.

• Deprecations: Hibernate's @ForeignKey in HHH-8170 (use JPA's @ForeignKey), @IndexColumn and @ListIndexBase in HHH-8163, and @Sort in HHH-8164 (use @SortNatural or @SortComparator)

JBoss Nexus: https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/org/hibernate
Maven Central: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/hibernate/hibernate-core (should update in a couple of days)
SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4
Downloads: 4.3.0.Beta2 ZIP, 4.3.0.Beta2 TGZ

Today we are happy to announce the 5.0.1.Final release of Hibernate Validator. In case you are wondering what happened with 5.0.0.Final - it has not gone missing. In fact it was released on the 11th of April.

The long story is, that we had to release 5.0.0.Final to meet the Java EE 7 release schedule. At the time the functionality was complete, but documentation was not. Given the amount of changes introduced by Bean Validation 1.1, we felt it was important to wait with the announcement of Hibernate Validator 5 until the documentation is up to scratch. That's the case with 5.0.1.Final. Not only does this release offer a complete Bean Validation 1.1 implementation it also includes an updated online documentation.

The highlights of Hibernate Validator 5 are (with pointers into the freshly baked documentation):

• Standardized method validation of parameters and return values. This has been a Hibernate Validator 4 specific functionality, but got now standardized as part of Bean Validation 1.1.
• Integration with Context and Dependency Injection (CDI). There are default ValidatorFactory and Validator instances available and you can now use @Inject in ConstraintValidator implementations out of the box. Requested custom implementations (via validation.xml) of resources like ConstraintValidatorFactory, MessageInterpolator, ParameterNameProvider or TraversableResolver are also provided as managed beans. Last but not least, the CDI integration offers transparent method validation for CDI beans.
• Group conversion
• Error message interpolation using EL expressions

We are also planning to create a little blog series introducing these new features in more detail. Stay tuned!

For now have a look at the Getting Started section of the documentation to see what you need to use Hibernate Validator 5. Naturally you will need the new Bean Validation 1.1 dependency, but you will also need an EL implementation - either provided by a container or added to your Java SE environment. Additional migration pointers can also be found in the Hibernate Validator migration guide.

You find the full release notes as usual on Jira. Maven artefacts are on the JBoss Maven repository under the GAV org.hibernate:hibernate-validator:5.0.1.Final and distribution bundles are available on SourceForge.

We are looking forward to get some feedback either on the Hibernate Validator forum or on stackoverflow using the hibernate-validator tag.

Enjoy!

Hibernate ORM 4.2.1.Final and 4.1.12.Final were just released. The full changelogs can be viewed here: 4.2.1.Final and 4.1.12.Final

Originally, 4.1.11 was slated to be the final release of 4.1.x. However, in HHH-8149, we reverted HHH-7797 for 4.1 (changed unique columns, keys, and constraints). The change had snowballed into numerous issues and, in hindsight, shouldn't have been made in 4.1.x to begin with. To clean things up, it was decided to release 4.1.12.

4.2.1 includes several notable changes:

• HHH-8175 Official support for Postgresql 9.2, Postgres Plus 9.2, and IBM DB2 10.1. Luckily, these mostly worked out-of-the-box with our existing dialects. Only a few test changes were necessary.

• As mentioned above, HHH-7797 (release 4.2.0) changed the way uniqueness is handled. Rather than mixing "unique" on column definitions, "unique(columns...)" on table definitions, unique indexes, and unique constraints, all were changed to solely use unique constraints (DB2 is the exception -- indexes are use in certain circumstances). The issues mentioned were corrected in this release: HHH-8092, HHH-8162, and HHH-8178.

• More details about HHH-8162: Since unique constraints are now the default, special handling was necessary within SchemaUpdate. The method used is configurable, selected with the "hibernate.schema_update.unique_constraint_strategy" property. DROP_RECREATE_QUIETLY is the default. It attempts to drop, then (re-)create each unique constraint within your model. All errors and exceptions (constraint doesn't exist, constraint already existed, etc.) are ignored. RECREATE_QUIETLY is the same, but does not attempt the drop. SKIP will not attempt to drop or create unique constraints at all on the SchemaUpdate.

• HHH-1904 In order to ensure that Hibernate does not generate foreign key and unique key names that are too long for certain dialects (ie, Oracle), the generation now uses random characters < 30 characters in length. Of course, this does not affect keys explicitly named in your mappings.

• HHH-7617 Support for generating Eclipse IDE projects was improved. Please see this post for more info.

• Our ClassLoader concepts for OSGi support were greatly improved by HHH-8096. In addition, HHH-7993 supports basic Bundle scanning to automatically discover entities and mappings in your persistence unit bundle.

• HHH-7714 added support for EntityMode.MAP in the JPA Criteria API.

• HHH-8183 supports synonyms in schema validation. Enable the capability with the "hibernate.synonyms=true" property (disabled by default).

• HHH-8203 ensures support of Proxool 0.9.1.

JBoss Nexus: https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/org/hibernate
Maven Central: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/hibernate/hibernate-core (should update in a couple of days)
SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4
Downloads: 4.2.1.Final ZIP, 4.2.1.Final TGZ, 4.1.12.Final ZIP, 4.1.12.Final TGZ