That’s right, the new major rev to Hibernate is ready to download (an alpha of it, at least). Check out the road map and changelog for the release.

All in all, it looks like a reasonabyl exciting release – it fills in many of the gaps in varieties of mapping, and adds some convenience functionality. This is excellent since, when I began using Hibernate, many of these things were dismissed as unnecessary. Sometimes it is recognized as being “for marketing purposes”, which I take to mean that they probably would advise against it, but too many people ask for it to leave the features out. Since the whole ORM thing is often predicated on the developers’ inability to control the database schema, I’m very glad to hear this.

It is also promising that the Hibernate team has demonstrated that they will be actively enhancing and maintaining this software. I’ve seen too many other major projects hit a certain point and then just stagnate. Great work, Hibernate team!