We are in the process of revamping our persistence layer from some proprietary orm. Most of our developers are already familiar with hibernate 2 and also its gotchas. So we decided to stay with Hibernate (instead of switching to jpa2 as it means new learning curve etc etc). But the questions is to stick with the 2.x version which we are already using (but mostly simple selects and simple inserts only) or to move to 3.x?
After going through their release docs, there seems to be around 1200+ defects fixed or enhancements made etc. This is just enough for me to move to 3.x. Can someone enlighten us on what we will be gaining if we move to 3.x or what will be problems of staying with 2.x.
Thank you.
Move to 3.x if you have a chance. Not only because the 2.x is not maintained anymore, but also because 3.x contains a lot of new features (which you may need in the future) and performance improvements. One more thing to consider is that 2.x wasn’t designed for modern VMs, so, 3.x contains some optimizations for newer JDBCs and newer VMs. And I didn’t even mentioned JPA (and Annotations) support 😉
I’d say that it’s better to spend one or two weeks “learning” about JPA than to stick with Hibernate 2.x, which has no future.