JSR-303 or the Bean Validation specification was recently released in its final draft. As this post points out, among its most relevant areas are: Type-safe constraint validator, XML configuration and XML mapping support, clearer names, integration into JPA 2 and JSF 2, as well as more built-in constraints Read the entire post 'Bean Validation (JSR 303) hits proposed final draft': http://relation.to/Bloggers/BeanValidationJSR303HitsProposedFinalDraft