Envers is an open-source project from JBoss which aims to provide easy versioning of persistent JPA classes. InfoQ provided information about the first GA release, 1.0.0, back in July of 2008. Since then Envers 1.1.0 was released which provided several new features.
The primary focus for the 1.1.0 release was the addition of support for persistent collections. Adam Warski, founder of Envers, described the new feature:
You can now version any relation, collections of “simple” types, maps, etc. All collection mappings defined by JPA are now supported, and most of what Hibernate additionally allows also.
The latest release also included some other improvements and bug fixes, as well as updates to the demos. With the continuing improvements to Envers, there is other news which was the source for this news item. On October 30, 2008 Envers officially became a module of Hibernate. The Envers website, documentation and forum will stay at there original home page for some time to come. The primary major changes were listed by Adam Warski on his blog:
- The code is now in the hibernate-core repository (envers module). There will be no more commits to the old repository.
- Issue tracking moved to Hibernate’s JIRA. All open issues from the old JIRA have been moved there.
- Envers is now built using maven2, which replaces the old ant build
It's exciting times for Adam Warski and other contributors to Envers. The move to the Hibernate family should aid in the continued development of the Envers module and the further expansion into developers toolbelts when it comes to persisting Java objects.