I think it should be mentioned somewhere that the Hibernate Validator functionality can be used in apps that do not use any of the ORM features. As more people move to Java 5, I have read posts in the Spring world and some of the web framework discussions about creating an annotations based validator.

The hibernate validator works very well. I would hate to see in a year or so several "standard" incompatible validation packages. It may be worth mentioning to other groups that this validator may be used regardless of the persistence framework used. One does need to include the Annotations and full Hibernate 3.1 jars.

Right, I'd love to see someone prototyping a Hibernate core agnostic version of this framework and an extension point to get the DDL alteration we currently have.