The Hibernate team is proud to announce the Hibernate ORM 4.3.0.Final Release. With this release, Hibernate is now a certified implementation of the JPA 2.1 specification. Certified awesomeness!

A lot of work has gone into this release over the last few months. The main focus of 4.3 was JPA 2.1 support, so much of the work these past few months focused on new JPA 2.1 features. The new features defined for JPA 2.1 include:

Support for stored procedures. See my previous blog for details

CriteriaUpdate and CriteriaDelete allow definition and execution of UPDATE and DELETE queries in type-safe Criteria form.

and allow definition and execution of UPDATE and DELETE queries in type-safe Criteria form. Entity listeners can now take advantage of dependency injection through CDI.

AttributeConverters, which define the ability to apply conversions on basic values between their database representation and their representation in your domain model. This is similar in concept to Hibernate's Type contract, although certainly less powerful (can only apply to basic values and operate on in-memory values). On the positive side, JPA AttributeConverters are portable across providers.

contract, although certainly less powerful (can only apply to basic values and operate on in-memory values). On the positive side, JPA AttributeConverters are portable across providers. Entity Graph support

Standardized schema generation. With 2.1 JPA now defines schema generation which is standardized across providers in terms of how generation is performed and the settings providers understand as a baseline. Arun Gupta has a good write up of the basic schema generation support.

Synchronization of persistence contexts via SynchronizationType

@ConstructorResult support in result set mappings for native queries

The significant non-JPA work that has gone into 4.3 includes: