Hi,

I have a separate, shared Maven module for shared classes that includes my model classes. I would like to be able to annotate these classes, but avoid including the full Hibernate API.

Ideally, the annotations would be accessible in a separate artifact. There appears to be something along the lines of what I am looking for org.hibernate:hibernate-annotations [1]. Unfortunately, it seems like this artifact has been deprecated (or unmaintained) and has not been updated since 3.5.6. Does anybody know the story behind this artifact? Should I assume it is no longer usable?

Has anyone solved a similar problem? I was considering using the Maven optional dependency flag but I am unsure about how this would work with annotations when Hibernate is not included (i.e. what if a class is annotated with annotations that are not on the classpath?)

[1] http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.hibernate/hibernate-annotations