Jakarta Bean Validation - Bean Validation 2.0 Early Draft 1 is Out

I’m very happy to announce the first Early Draft Review of JSR 380, Bean Validation 2.0!

This Early Draft comprises all the spec changes done so far and it’s a great opportunity for us to get feedback from the community at large. You can read the spec draft either directly on this website or download it from jcp.org. A GitHub diff showing all the changes to the spec’s AsciiDoc document done so far (sans some typo and style fixes) is available here.

The updated API can be downloaded from from jcp.org or fetched from Maven Central using the coordinates javax.validation:validation-api:2.0.0.Alpha1.

What’s New?

The main theme of Bean Validation 2.0 is support for and taking advantage of Java 8. This concerns new language features such as type use annotations as well as library additions.

An example of the latter is the support for the new Java 8 date and time API (JSR 310). You can now use @Past and @Future on javax.time types such as Instant, LocalDate etc.:

@Future
private LocalDate deliveryDate;

For types that don’t represent a specific instant but rather an interval of time, you can configure that the current month, year etc. should be considered valid, too, using the new attribute orPresent():

@Past(orPresent=true)
private final Year inceptionYear = Year.of( 2017 );

An example where Bean Validation benefits from new language features in Java 8 is the new mechanism for validating the elements of Collection, Optional and other container types. By annotating type arguments of generic types you can now put constraints to the container elements (as opposed to the container itself):

List<@NotNull @Email String> emails;

Also cascaded validation (@Valid) gets more powerful with that. E.g. you can now perform a cascaded validation of map keys and map values (only values were supported before):

Map<@Valid Customer, @Valid Address> primaryAddressByCustomer;

Another use case for this is validation of values wrapped in a java.util.Optional:

Optional<@Past LocalDate> getRegistrationDate();

We’ve baked in support for type argument constraints on types such as Iterable, Map, Optional and some more, but this isn’t a fixed list. You can plug in custom implementations of the ValueExtractor contract which will allow you to put type argument constraints to other collection types (e.g. Google Guava’s Multimap) or even collection classes from other JVM languages such as Ceylon.

What else?

Support for JSR 310 and type argument constraints are just two of the new features. Some other changes are:

All constraints and a few other Bean Validation annotations are repeatable
Method parameter names to be shown in error messages are obtained using reflection (if enabled)
ConstraintValidator#initialize() is a default method, simplifying the implementation of constraint validators which don’t need to access the annotation state
ValidatorFactory extends AutoCloseable, allowing to use it in try-with-resources blocks

To learn more about the changes we’ve done so far, either check out our progress report from a few weeks ago or the specification document itself.

What’s next?

The next step will be to bring the Bean Validation reference implementation, Hibernate Validator, up to par with the Early Draft 1. Most of the work for this has been done already, so you can expect the first Alpha release of Hibernate Validator 6 later this week. This will allow you to play around with all the new features and explore them in more depth.

This release will add some features on top of what is in spec so far, e.g. support for defining constraints using Lambda expressions. We felt it’d be good to gain some experience with this and some other features by putting an implementation into the hands of users before adding them to the spec. More details on that once the reference implementation is out.

In terms of spec changes, some of the next features we are planning to work on are:

Adding some new constraints as per our recent survey, e.g. @Email, @NotEmpty, @NotBlank
Ability to validate an object and a list of changes (BVAL-214) which would be useful for validating class-level constraints in UI use cases
Separating the message interpolation algorithm from the retrieval of messages from resource bundles (BVAL-217)

What can you do to help?

Glad you asked :)

As in its previous versions, Bean Validation 2.0 is developed fully in the open. So we count on your feedback on the Early Draft as well as any other ideas or suggestions you may have around Bean Validation. One area where we are looking for feedback specifically is the proposal for container value validation. There is a list of open questions towards the end of that section. If you have thoughts on any of those, please let us know.

To get a discussion started, just post a comment below, send a message to our mailing list or post in the Bean Validation forum. If you find a bug or have a specific feature request, please raise them in the issue tracker.

And as Bean Validation is a true open source project, contributing e.g. in form of patches is easy, too. Check out the contribution guide to learn more.

Finally, let me say a big thank you to everyone involved with making the Early Draft happen; your work is much appreciated!