[hibernate-dev] Programmatic entity mapping API

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