Jakarta Validation

Good news for those of you who want to certify the compatibility of a Bean Validation implementation (and its API JAR) against Java SE 8.

We have released updates to the Bean Validation TCK 1.0 and 1.1; The versions are 1.0.7.GA and 1.1.3.Final, respectively. Both TCK releases come now with a version of the API signature file which works with Java SE 8. This signature file can be used to assert API compatibility with JSR 303/349 via the SigTest tool. SigTest 3.0 needs to be used from now on. Note that the actual tests of the TCKs remain unchanged.

You can get distribution bundles with the new signature file from SourceForge (1.0, 1.1).

More information about the Bean Validation TCK can be found here. Refer to the TCK reference guide (1.0, 1.1) if you would like to learn more about the process of asserting API compatibility.

Don't hesitate to contact us in case you have any questions around the Bean Validation specification in general or the TCK in particular.

I have two good Bean Validation related content for you today.

Training slides (in French)

Laurent Guerin wrote a comprehensive training on Bean Validation (1.0 and 1.1) for French students. The slides are available under a Creative Commons license. I did review them and they are very good.

The bad news is that they are in French. The good news is that they are in French!

Video training (in English)

Antonio Goncalves, my esteemed co-host of Les Cast Codeurs has published a 2 and a half hour video training on Bean Validation. It is hosted on Pluralsight where packages start at $29 / month but you can get the first 10 days free.

The good news is that Antonio has a Dr Love / French accent combo voice. The bad news? I'll let you find out ;)

Let me know if you have found good materials on Bean Validation. We might start a dedicated page on the website.

Antonio Goncalves, fellow JCP member and friend has asked me why Bean Validation XML's namespace has not moved from its original location to the jcp.org location like other Java EE 7 specifications.

I don't remember being aware that such a move was orchestrated so there are two possible reasons:

1. I was never been made aware of the move,
2. I was aware of it but considered that it was low priority compared to the other issues we were working on.

Provided we had to work hard till the last minute, and that the community never was keen on the XML support we put in Bean Validation, #2 is not impossible but I suspect it's #1 or I would have opened an issue to track the task.

Anyways, that's not a problem. Anyone can open an issue (I've just created one for this task), write a couple of pull requests to fix the spec, TCK and RI as explained in our contribute section. Scratch your own itch: so who's jumping? :)

We will have to wait for the next version of the spec to avoid breaking older applications but if it's committed, it won't be forgotten.

PS: no, I'm not bitter, but since I haven't blogged in a while that was a good occasion to remind everyone of the power of contributions ;)

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 (Validator and ValidatorFactory injectable, ConstraintValidator instances 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.

Bean Validation, Hibernate Validator (its Reference Implementation) and the Test Compatibility Kit have been handed over to the JCP for what is called the Final Approval Ballot. That's when the expert committee votes for the go / no-go of the specification going final as it is.

We have found a few glitches when working on both the RI and the TCK in the last month but everything is in order now. The biggest visible change for you is that we renamed @ValidateExecutable into @ValidateOnExecution and we added a way to disable method validation entirely via the XML deployment descriptor.

We worked hard to make a stellar TCK. Let's speak numbers: the specification has 549 assertions including 492 testable. We cover 98,8% of them with 1500 tests. Good luck to all future Bean Validation 1.1 implementors :)

Everything is already available for you to use:

• the specification
• Hibernate Validator (the RI)
• the TCK

Enjoy!