Hibernate Validator

9.1 series development

This series targets to improve performance, updates dependencies, includes improvements and bug fixes.

Hibernate Validator 9.1 is still in development:

  • some features may be incomplete;

  • newly introduced features may change in a backward-incompatible way before the stable release.

We encourage you to give it a try and to let us know of any bugs or problems you encounter.

Compatibility

Java 17, 21, 23 or 24
Jakarta Bean Validation 3.1
Jakarta EE 11

Not compatible with your requirements? Have a look at the other series.

See also the Compatibility policy and Maintenance policy.

Documentation

Documentation for Hibernate Validator 9.1 can be accessed through the links below:

Getting started guide HTML PDF

What's new HTML

Migration guide HTML

Reference HTML PDF API (Javadoc)

You can find more documentation for all series on the documentation page.

How to get it

Current series status: development

Maven artifacts of Hibernate Validator are published to Maven Central. Most build tools fetch artifacts from Maven Central by default, but if that's not the case for you, see this page to configure your build tool.

You can find the Maven coordinates of all artifacts through the link below:

Maven artifacts

Below are the Maven coordinates of the main artifacts.

org.hibernate.validator:hibernate-validator-bom:9.1.0.Alpha1
BOM to help manage published Hibernate Validator artifacts
org.hibernate.validator:hibernate-validator:9.1.0.Alpha1
Core implementation
org.hibernate.validator:hibernate-validator-cdi:9.1.0.Alpha1
CDI integration
org.hibernate.validator:hibernate-validator-annotation-processor:9.1.0.Alpha1
Annotation processor
org.hibernate.validator:hibernate-validator-test-utils:9.1.0.Alpha1
Set of test utilities that can help testing custom constraints.

All Maven artifacts of this project released after 2022-02-08 are signed.

To verify signed Maven artifacts, head to this page.

Direct download

A ZIP archive containing all JAR files, documentation and source is available from SourceForge:

Download ZIP archive

Individual Maven artifacts may be downloaded directly from the Maven repository:

Maven Central subdirectory

See here for how to download all dependencies of your Maven project to a local directory on your filesystem.

See here for how to download an explicitly listed set of artifacts to a local directory on your filesystem.

More information about specific releases (announcements, download links) can be found here.

What's new

Latest release announcement (2025-08-28): 9.1.0.Alpha1.

A detailed list of new features, improvements and fixes in this series can be found on our issue tracker.

Jakarta EE 11

Hibernate Validator 9.1 continues to target Jakarta Validation 3.1 and requires a minimum Java version of 17.

Performance improvements

In this version, we have changed the jakarta.validation.Path implementation, approach to processed bean tracking and slightly modified the message interpolation to improve both overall performance and performance of cascading validation when beans require a lot of cascading operations. We plan to publish a more detailed report with benchmark results, so stay tuned if you are interested in the details and numbers.

Deprecating the use of @Valid at the container level

Since Bean Validation 2.0, which introduced type argument constraints, the approach of placing the @Valid annotation at the container level to apply cascading validation to container elements has been considered a "legacy" approach. Users have been encouraged to move their constraints to the type argument level.

Example 1. Legacy approach to cascading validation for container elements
class MyBean {
    @Valid (1)
    List<MyContainerElement> list;
}
1 Cascading validation is requested at the container level, whereas the expectation is that container elements will be considered for cascading, not the container itself.
Example 2. Current approach to cascading validation for container elements
class MyBean {
    List<@Valid MyContainerElement> list; (1)
}
1 Cascading validation is requested at the container element level. This clearly communicates the intention that elements are expected to be cascaded into and not the container itself.

Starting with 9.1, Hibernate Validator will produce warnings during the metadata building step if it detects the legacy approach to cascading validation of container elements. In the future version, this support of Bean Validation 1.0/1.1 legacy behaviour will be dropped. Placing the @Valid at the container level would result in cascading into the container itself rather than into its elements.

There is still some work ahead of us before we can turn off this legacy behaviour. For example, we must address the case where the container does not have type arguments but still requires cascading into its elements. This is currently tracked at the Jakarta Validation specification level through the following issue.

We encourage users to review and update their validation mapping where necessary. Additionally, if you encounter a particular use case that you believe is not covered, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Development versions (SNAPSHOTS)

The latest development versions of Maven artifacts for Hibernate Validator are published to the Sonatype Maven Central snapshots repository.

Sonatype Maven Central snapshots subdirectory

You should only need those (unstable) versions for testing recently merged patches, and should never use them in production.

To consume these artifacts, you may need to configure your build tool to fetch artifacts from https://central.sonatype.com/repository/maven-snapshots and to enable snapshots:

Maven Gradle

Releases in this series

9.1.0.Alpha1

2025-08-28

ASL v2

This series targets to improve performance, updates dependencies, includes improvements and bug fixes.

How to get it

Maven artifacts Download Resolved issues Release announcement

Back to top