Hibernate 2.1.6 or 3.x?

Question

We are in the process of updating our level of persistence from some proprietary form. Most of our developers are already familiar with hibernate 2, as well as its gotchas. Therefore, we decided to stay with Hibernate (instead of switching to jpa2, as this means a new learning curve, etc.). But the questions should coincide with the version 2.x that we already use (but most often we just select and simply insert) or go to 3.x?

After going through their release documents, it seems that about 1200+ fixes or improvements have been fixed. This is enough to upgrade to 3.x. Can someone enlighten us about what we will get if we move to 3.x or what problems will remain with 2.x.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Move to 3.x if you have a chance. Not only because 2.x is no longer supported, but also because 3.x contains many new features (which you may need in the future) and performance improvements. Another thing to keep in mind is that 2.x was not designed for modern virtual machines, so 3.x contains some optimizations for new JDBC and new virtual machines. And I did not even mention support for JPA (and Annotations); -)

I would say it's better to spend one or two weeks learning JPA than stick to Hibernate 2.x, which has no future.