JBoss has released Hibernate 3.2, their popular persistence engine, now certified compliant with the Java Persistence API. In addition to JPA compliance, hibernate adds new query capabilities, declarative data filters, and optimistic locking in a cluster with JBoss Cache.

The Hibernate 3.2 release includes:

• Hibernate Core is the full featured, high performance object/relational persistence and query service that popularized object/relational mapping for Java. Hibernate relieves developers from 95 percent of common data persistence related programming tasks, compared to manual coding with SQL and the JDBC API. Hibernate Core offers a powerful native data management and query API, and object/relational mapping with XML metadata. Hibernate Core requires JDK 1.3 or greater and works with any J2EE 1.4 or Java EE 5.0 application server.
• Hibernate Annotations offers several packages of JDK 5.0 code annotations that developers can use to map classes, as a replacement or in addition to XML metadata. Hibernate Annotations supports standard Java Persistence object/relational mapping annotations, native Hibernate extension annotations, and declarative data integrity rule definition and validation with the Hibernate Validator framework. Hibernate Annotations requires JDK 5.0.
• Hibernate EntityManager implements the Java Persistence programming interfaces, object lifecycle rules, and query options as defined by Java Specification Request 220 (EJB 3.0). Combined with Hibernate Annotations, this wrapper offers a complete Java Persistence provider on top of the mature and powerful Hibernate Core. The Hibernate Java Persistence provider is the default Java Persistence provider of the JBoss EJB 3.0 implementation. Additionally, it can be used inside any other Java EE 5.0 application server or standalone with JDK 5.0.

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Congrat for the finally releases of 3.2. It is much to be hoped, that some existing minor (but sometimes a little bit painful) problems of Annotations and JPA are now solved with 3.2 ... Hibernate and JPA, Annotations rocks ... Roland SOA Kompetenznetzwerk Information & Collaboration Portal New Look & Feel and advanced Information- & Collaboration Strategy are upcoming, soon ...

For JPA, which is better, Hibernate or Toplink Essentials? What are the differences between the two as it relates to JPA? Which works better with Derby? Mike

For JPA, which is better, Hibernate or Toplink Essentials?

In my experience, Hibernate. Although Toplink does seem to be a functional implementation of the spec, what we found was that if something in the spec was marked as 'optional' (and some of these 'optional' features are quite useful) then Toplink essentials probably didn't support it, whereas Hibernate did. I guess if you want to remain entirely portable then you don't want to be using optional features, but working around the gaps in the implementation in a portable way can be lots of extra work for the developer. The features in Hibernate became so important for us that we actually replaced the default Toplink based EntityManager with Hibernate in Glassfish. YMMV.

For JPA, which is better, Hibernate or Toplink Essentials?

In my experience, Hibernate. Although Toplink does seem to be a functional implementation of the spec, what we found was that if something in the spec was marked as 'optional' (and some of these 'optional' features are quite useful) then Toplink essentials probably didn't support it, whereas Hibernate did.

I guess if you want to remain entirely portable then you don't want to be using optional features, but working around the gaps in the implementation in a portable way can be lots of extra work for the developer.

The features in Hibernate became so important for us that we actually replaced the default Toplink based EntityManager with Hibernate in Glassfish.

YMMV.

Which optional features are you referring to? Mike

The JPA spec describes some features as being optional (implementations are not required to support them), but there are also a number of features that are not yet included in JPA but that are still useful to some users. These will hopefully be included in future versions of the spec. The point is that the EJB 3.0 expert group had to try to decide on and describe the most useful features to standardize to satisfy the most people. Being the Reference Implementation of JPA and on the same release schedule as the spec, TopLink Essentials had to follow the same kind of plan and we chose to support the features that we saw as being the most important, some of which were listed as optional and some of which were not mentioned in the spec at all. Some of these features are supported by Hibernate and some are not. Likewise there are some features that Hibernate feels are important value add for its customers that we do not share. This thread is supposed to be dedicated to celebrating the fact that Hibernate has now achieved JPA compliance, allowing people to write the same code in Hibernate to work on any JPA vendor, not to highlight the non-standard features between implementations. Congrats to the Hibernate team for reaching this milestone. Doug Clarke Product Manager Oracle TopLink JPA

Excellent news, congrats to the Hibernate team.