I don’t think that support for Optional is that important since having a field of type Optional looks like an anti-pattern to me. Normally Optional should be used as a method return type and not as a type for a field. Supporting it in the bean validation might end in strange model classes.
Example:
The following model looks good to me:
public class Model {
@NotNull
private String name;
public String getName() { return name; }
public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; }
public Optional<String> name() { return Optional.ofNullable(name);}
}
On the other hand this looks like an anti-pattern to me:
public class Model {
@NotNull
private Optional<String> name;
public Optional<String> getName() { return name; }
public void setName(String name) { this.name = Optional.ofNullable(name); }
}