Roadmap

To learn more about what we introduced in our past releases, please consult the "What's new" section of a given series .

Hibernate Search is a community driven project and as such the roadmap constantly evolves to reflect the users needs.

You can find a finer grained roadmap in our issue tracker but this page is a good and concise view of where we are going.

Dates are generally omitted: milestones are released regularly, the Final release is tagged when it’s considered stable.

Releases

Hibernate Search 6.2

For a full list of issues currently planned for this series, see here.

Better control over indexing

Hibernate Search 6.2 will provide ways to suspend automatic indexing. See HSEARCH-168, HSEARCH-1383.
For some use cases where maintenance downtime during mass indexing is not acceptable, Hibernate Search needs to be able to create a new copy of the index, index everything into that new copy, and replace the old copy with the new one atomically, so that clients can continue querying the old index while mass indexing is in progress, and never see an empty index (but only, at worst, an out-of-date index). See HSEARCH-3499.

Hibernate Search for arbitrary data sources

Experimental module allowing integration with a datastore that is not accessed using Hibernate ORM.

Users will need to put in more work to configure it, in particular they will need to capture insert/update/delete events themselves.

Nevertheless, this could be useful for people looking to add full-text search to any application, not just applications relying on Hibernate ORM.

For a full list of issues currently planned for this series, see here.

Upgrade baseline requirements

Upgrade to newer versions of dependencies and drop compatibility with older technologies. In particular:

HSEARCH-4556 Require JDK 11 (at least)
HSEARCH-4393 Upgrade to Lucene 9.x (which requires JDK 11)
HSEARCH-4394 Switch from Java EE to Jakarta EE
HSEARCH-4395 Upgrade to Hibernate ORM 6 (with requires Jakarta EE instead of Java EE) and drop compatibility with Hibernate ORM 5

For a full list of issues currently planned for this series, see here.

Search query features

Add more features to the Hibernate Search DSL. In particular:

HSEARCH-2192 Highlighting in the Search API
HSEARCH-917 Add match all terms option when matching in the DSL API
HSEARCH-3327 Add options for match predicates targeting multiple fields
HSEARCH-3926 Predicate on multiple fields designated by a single label/group name/etc. ("_all", copy_to, …)

Reactive Search

Experiment with integrating Hibernate Search with Hibernate Reactive.

For a full list of issues currently planned for this series, see here.

More advanced mapping

Allow more complex setups when it comes to mapping entities to indexes. In particular:

Some specialized field types

Add commonly used field types. In particular:

Fields derived from large blobs, useful when indexing PDFs with Apache Tika for example.
Maybe more, depending on demand, e.g. HSEARCH-3488 Add support for nanosecond precision for temporal fields.

Tracing

Tracing of search queries and indexing requests to enable easier debugging and performance investigation.

Free-form indexing: We’re planning to decouple the metadata definition from annotated java classes, to allow better indexing of other more flexible sources; for example to make it easier to index data structured in the JSON format, or other formats whose schema is not known at compile time.
Debezium integration: Asynchronous indexing driven by Change Data Capture in the database instead of Hibernate ORM events.

This would allow capturing changes caused by any SQL command, not just those issued by Hibernate ORM.

See HSEARCH-3513.