JBoss, Inc. Releases Powerful, Enterprise-Ready Hibernate 3.0.

ATLANTA -- Extends Sophisticated Object/Relational Mapping Technology with Functionality Critical to Enterprise Deployment

JBoss(R), Inc., the Professional Open Source company, today introduced Hibernate 3.0, the next generation of its market-leading open source object/relational mapping (ORM) technology. A groundbreaking product from its first release, Hibernate 3.0 takes ORM and persistence to unprecedented levels of functionality, simplicity and ease-of-use.

New features--including filtering support for temporal and permissioned data, statistics reporting and monitoring and EJB3-style persistence and annotations--have been optimized for data-intensive enterprise environments, particularly in the financial and insurance industries as well as in e-commerce applications. In addition, Hibernate 3.0 offers an enhanced development toolset featuring JBoss Eclipse IDE plug-ins.

"Hibernate 3.0 is a milestone production release and validates the JBoss Professional Open Source model of providing core development, technology direction, support services and commercialization for innovative open source projects," said Marc Fleury, chairman and CEO, JBoss, Inc. "With Hibernate 3.0, Professional Open Source not only has delivered the most sophisticated ORM product on the market but also a standard-setting technology that has already revolutionized persistence in Java."

Hibernate is a core piece of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS). While it has been optimized for other products in the company's expanding open source software stack, Hibernate is a standalone product that runs independent of application platform. Hibernate relieves IT organizations from 95 percent of common data persistence programming tasks involved in mapping object-oriented software with relational databases. The representation of data in objects and databases is inherently incompatible, leading to extensive development time and cost for enterprises running e-business applications on object-oriented software and relational databases.

"Hibernate 3.0 represents a significant advancement of ORM technology, extending it from a Java developer's tool into a powerful centerpiece of the enterprise IT infrastructure," said Gavin King, Hibernate founder and JBoss, Inc. architect. "With Professional Open Source support from JBoss, the Hibernate team was able to implement a more aggressive technology roadmap, resulting in truly innovative features and an enterprise-class product that is ready to roll out into even the most mission-critical data environments."

"RouteOne utilizes Hibernate in our credit application management system, which accelerates the automotive finance process for several of the world's leading automotive dealers," said T.N. Subramaniam, director of technology, RouteOne. "It was crucial that we have a consistent standard that meets the demands of our business today, with room to scale in the future without sacrificing productivity. Our decision to use Hibernate was the right one, and we are very excited about Hibernate 3.0, which promises to be even better."

Key Features & Benefits

The most powerful new feature in Hibernate 3.0 is its unique ability to support and handle temporal, or historical, data. Until now, developers have had to write their own complex SQL code to access historical versions of data in the database. This is particularly true for enterprise applications in the financial and insurance industries or with e-commerce applications--all of which rely on sophisticated data that can go back years. Hibernate has parameterized "filters" that provide the ability to declaratively subset data visible to a user, making it possible to work efficiently with historical or regional data. With this innovative feature, Hibernate is the only ORM technology to support complex enterprise data models for historical and permissioned data. Hibernate also provides sophisticated new mapping functionality for use with legacy databases. Other key new features in Hibernate include:

--ORM Improvements - Hibernate builds on its support for mapping a wide range of data types by adding the ability to map a single object to multiple tables as well as override generated SQL with hand-written SQL. While Hibernate automatically generates efficient SQL, providing the flexibility to customize or hand-optimize SQL has been a popular feature request.

--Monitoring and Reporting - Hibernate adds the ability to report on and monitor a wide range of system statistics using any JMX compatible console. Moreover, Hibernate provides second-level cache and query cache browsers. These new features provide access to critical system information required for diagnosing and isolating performance problems in production applications.

--Emerging EJB3 Innovations - Hibernate supports the latest Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB3) draft specification and, in fact, provides a superset of the POJO (plain old Java object) persistence and annotations capabilities specified in this emerging new specification. The goal for these new EJB3 capabilities is to drive down the complexity of developing J2EE applications and Hibernate is leading the charge in this area.

--Hibernate Eclipse Toolset - An enhanced Hibernate toolset can be downloaded and used on its own or with the complete JBoss Eclipse IDE that provides a range of components and wizards for developing applications that leverage the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System. The toolset substantially simplifies development with a full port of the Hibernate console to Eclipse to provide integrated HQL query execution and result-set browsing, along with a Hibernate XML mapping editor that supports auto-completion and syntax highlighting. The Hibernate Eclipse toolset also enables users to reverse engineer an existing database schema into POJO source files and Hibernate mapping files.

Availability & Pricing

Hibernate is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and is free to download and use for development and production deployments. The license also allows ISVs to embed and distribute Hibernate free of charge. This means companies no longer need to design around the number of software licenses that fit into their budget. The zero-cost license ensures cost-effective deployment across as many systems and CPUs as an application requires--with no hidden costs.

Hibernate 3.0, the Eclipse toolset and the full JBoss Eclipse IDE version 1.5 are all available for download at http://www.jboss.com/downloads/index.

Support & Services

JBoss, Inc. provides a full range of support services for Hibernate and JBoss Eclipse IDE, including 24x7 professional support, consulting and training. Documentation is free and available in HTML or downloadable PDF format. Support customers rank JBoss, Inc. support services higher in every category compared to similar experiences with commercial software providers. Support services are also available through the company's extensive network of JBoss Authorized Service Partners (JASPs). For more information, please visit http://www.jboss.com/services/index.

About JBoss, Inc.

Through its Professional Open Source model, JBoss, Inc. is making open source a safe choice for the enterprise. JBoss provides resources, technology direction and core development for popular open source projects and stands behind them with enterprise-grade support and services. These projects include the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Eclipse IDE and Apache Jakarta Tomcat, which are core components of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS). Companies like Corporate Express, La Quinta Inns and Nielsen Media Research rely on JEMS for mission-critical enterprise applications. Partners who embed or bundle JEMS and resell JBoss services include Computer Associates, HP, Novell and Unisys. JBoss has headquarters in Atlanta, Ga. and Neuchatel, Switzerland. For additional information, please visit http://www.jboss.com.

JBoss is a registered trademark of JBoss, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Java and J2EE are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks herein are property of their respective owners.