A Public Scratchpad

I’ve written before about the problems which seem to crop up when you introduce Hibernate into your project. Unfortunately, I’m becoming more and more convinced that these are not isolated issues. Hibernate has a dependency management problem.

Things were not always this way. Hibernate was once independent, unbeholden to outside influences. Sure, you’ve always needed a somewhat-thicker-than-average skin in order to file bugs or ask questions in the forums. An extra helping of patience never hurt, either. But nowadays it seems like you need all of these things, plus the time and skill necessary to patch a JAR or two.

We recently upgraded to the latest Hibernate production JARs: Hibernate Core 3.2.6.GA, Hibernate Annotations 3.3.0.GA and Hibernate EntityManager 3.3.1.GA. Having already benefited from our earlier experience regarding conflicts between Spring and Hibernate, I figured this would take about five minutes: modify our root Maven2 POM, do a full build, verify everything works. Done! Not quite.

The first problem we encountered, reported 4 months ago, is that the production Hibernate EntityManager POM excludes a transitive dependency which it should not exclude. Net result? You have to hack together a custom version of Hibernate EntityManager which does not exclude this transitive dependency. Of course, this transitive dependency exists in the JBoss Maven2 repo, but not in the central repo. Nice.

Next, if you’re using a standard Maven2 Windows installation, you’ll run into this bug, because Hibernate now refuses to load JARs from directories with spaces in them (the standard location for Maven2 local repositories in Windows is in “Documents and Settings”). Very nice. Welcome to 1998!

You may notice a trend here: an old ASM dependency which causes conflicts with other libraries, a required dependency that is mistakenly excluded, and a dependency on a deprecated class in a buggy JBoss utility library.

Two of my co-workers are already suggesting we switch to TopLink. Jokingly, of course. For now. Napoleon is reputed to have said that “if they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks which precede cannon shots.” Third-party libraries should likewise avoid annoying their users with irritating minutiae, or they may find these users mobilizing the artillery.