It's now official, these couple of years of work have made it into an official JCP specification. Bean Validation is also part of Java EE 7 which has been approved too a few of days ago.
We have already discussed the features at great length here but to do a short summary:
- support for method and constructor validation (via CDI, JAX-RS etc)
- integration with CDI (
ValidatorandValidatorFactoryinjectable,ConstraintValidatorinstances being CDI beans and thus accept@Inject, etc) - EL expressions based error messages
- group conversion in object graphs
I would like to thank the expert group and the community at large (without your input there would be no 1.1), Hardy and Gunnar that worked round to clock on the spec, the RI and the TCK and deliver everything on time, Pete for being my springboard when all hell broke lose and the folks at Oracle who worked with us to integrate Bean Validation with the rest of the Java EE ecosystem whether it be spec, implementation or TCK.
Go grab Hibernate Validator, the RI. The team has even spent an extra couple of weeks to deliver a nice documentation. And if you can't sleep, go read the specification itself.