[Hibernate-devel] Recent Changes and 0.9.5

[Gavin_King/Cirrus%<CI...@ci...>]

Hi everyone :)

(Very-nearly) all features of 0.9.4 are now working in the main project
branch in CVS. Everyone should start using that branch as a baseline for
new development. (Future breakages will be done in a new branch.) There
have been a number of important changes:

1. As requested by Paul Szego, constructors may now be of any visibility.
previously they were forced to be private
2. Also as requested by Paul, property naming now complies with JavaBeans
specification ( "foo" instead of "Foo" ). Actually both styles now work.
3. Schema Generation now done by the map package (more OO) and there is a
new command-line tool for exporting schema
(cirrus.hibernate.test.DBSchemaExport). ALTER TABLE is no longer used to
create tables and its now possible to drop tables with circular foreign key
constraints on all databases.
3. The XML mapping has been changed in anticipation of us deprecating
Persistent. The old style is deprecated but still works for classes that
_do_ implement Persisent.

Immediate priorities for me + Daniel are:
1. Deprecate the Persistent interface
2. Document new mapping style and the schema export tool

Who is affected by this?

Doug Currie, who was working on the reflective map generator will be
affected most affected by the new mapping style and by deprecation of
Persistent. Presumably some user input is no required in order to determine
what classes are entities, which are components, which are to be
serialized.

Anyone like Phillip Baird who is working with databases with no ALTER TABLE
statement will now be able to use hibernate for schema generation and
properly test dialects.

We can now start work on XML databinding (yay!)

Also, would people please review the changes to hibernate-mapping.dtd and
suggest futher changes (to naming or structure).

We are thinking of releasing a version 0.9.5 on thursday or friday evening
if no-one finds any issues or bugs with the current version.

Thanks to everyone for their input so far!

Peace

Gavin