Hibernate has recently released the final version of Hibernate ORM 4.3, a Java-based ORM framework that also supports stored procedures and entity graphs. ORM Tool Hibernate 4.3 Released, Implementing JPA 2.1 Specification introduces the main features of the release, which are in short:

• Support for working with stored procedure and function calls, across both providers and database vendors.
• UPDATE and DELETE queries in a type-safe way.
• The CDI standard (JSR-299) can be used by entity listeners, for implementing lifecycle events in separate classes.
• AttributeConverters for converting basic values between the representation in the database and in the corresponding objects.
• Entity Graphs for defining how an entity and its sub-elements are loaded.
• A standardized way of how schema generation is performed across providers together with a baseline of configuration settings all providers understand.
• SynchronizationType for control over the synchronization of persistence context with the current transaction.
• @ConstructorResult annotation can be used to construct objects using the argument values returned from a SQL query.

Other significant changes include:

• Increased support for OSGi environments.
• Support for inline dirty checking, finding which entities state has changed, based on new bytecode enhancement support within Hibernate.