BEA fired back a sharp response. "BEA is glad to see JBoss has outdated information on Kodo. We have had JPA support in Kodo, as well as in its tools, BEA Workshop, since 2005," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA Workshop at BEA. "Our superior tooling and support for standards give us a position that JBoss would envy, if they bothered to look at our products."

JPA, Venkataraman said, has replaced the notion of Entity Beans as a way to handle persistence in Java EE 5. JBoss contributed many ideas to the JPA, but it is not based solely on Hibernate, according to JBoss.

Another new feature in Version 3.2 is customizable context management for Java environments. Also, an optimistic locking function, for record-locking, can lock in a cluster with the new JBoss Cache provider. Declarative data filers are featured for transparent definition of dynamic data views. Enhanced query options and query language are included in Version 3.2 as well.

Also offered as part of the Hibernate 3.2 release are modular bundles, including Hibernate Core, which is a high-performance query service for object-relational mapping usage. It features a data management and query API and object-relational mapping with XML metadata. Hibernate Annotations in Version 3.2 include several packages of JDK (Java Development Kit) 5.0 code annotations for mapping classes as a replacement or in addition to XML metadata. The Hibernate EntityManager in Version 3.2 implements Java Persistence programming interfaces, object lifecycle rules, and query options as defined by Java Specification Request 220.

Although the Core, Annotations, and EntityManager are not new with Version 3.2, developers now have the flexibility to use these in combinations with or without an application server.