Deprecate Hibernate 3 support [SPR-13230]

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller opened SPR-13230 and commented

After the introduction of Hibernate 5 support in Spring 4.2, we should officially deprecate our orm.hibernate3 package in Spring 4.3.

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Issue Links:

• Support for Hibernate ORM 5.0 [SPR-11694] #16316 Support for Hibernate ORM 5.0
• Deprecate Tiles 2 support [SPR-12214] #16828 Deprecate Tiles 2 support
• Deprecate Velocity support [SPR-13235] #17826 Deprecate Velocity support
• Section 19.3.2 of reference mentions Hibernate 3 should be just Hibernate [SPR-14176] #18747 Section 19.3.2 of reference mentions Hibernate 3 should be just Hibernate
• Remove native support for Hibernate 3.6 and 4.x [SPR-13827] #18400 Remove native support for Hibernate 3.6 and 4.x

Referenced from: commits e909422, 2cfe00c

[spring-projects-issues]

Alex commented

The hibernate team has already deprecated hibernate 4.x: http://in.relation.to/2015/10/27/great-jira-cleanup-2015/

"Now that ORM 5.0 has gone final, we need to focus our development efforts on 5.0 and beyond.
http://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Huge-Project,-Small-Team discusses why we do this.
Put simply, versions prior to 5.x are no longer maintained and bug reports which do not affect 5.0 are outside that focus."

So the default hibernate version should be 5.x, and you should deprecate also 4.x together with 3.x

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

Formally deprecating Hibernate 4.x support for Spring 4.3 is a tough one, since the current JBoss EAP 6.4 still includes Hibernate ORM 4.2.x - which is a reason why they have to keep maintaining it... maybe not the core Hibernate team but somebody at Red Hat, since JBoss EAP 6 will enjoy continued commercial support for many years to come.

There was never declared production support for Hibernate ORM 4.3.x, so that's an easier one to let go on their side. That doesn't buy us much though since we can't just let 4.3.x go. From that perspective, we'll have to keep our orm.hibernate4 package up for the time being, simply dropping it without deprecation as of Spring Framework 5.0.

Juergen