[hibernate-dev] Programmatic entity mapping API

[Gunnar Morling]

Hi all,

This has crossed my mind for a few times: should we provide a programmatic
API in Hibernate ORM for mapping entities, as an alternative mapping
definition source to annotations and XML? I.e. something similar to the
programmatic mapping APIs we have in Hibernate Validator and Search.

It'd probably be a fair bit of work (though giving lots of fun with API
design), but I can see how it could be appealing to folks preferring
API-style ways of configuring their stack, which seems more and more en
vogue these days. Using lambda expressions would be attractive especially
when it comes to plugging in custom behaviours, e.g. for value generators.

Any thoughts?

--Gunnar