As many of you know, I stopped doing development work on Hibernate some months ago in order to concentrate on Seam:

http://jboss.com/products/seam

Seam was born out of our frustration with the limitations of todays stateless application architectures (stateless session facade, Spring, RoR, etc), which do not include constructs for modeling optimistic transactions, and therefore cause all kinds of problems for Hibernate users (LazyInitializationException and his friends). It has now grown into much more - you can find out more here:

http://www.jboss.com/products/seam/whyseam

This morning we released Seam 1.1 GA. This release is extremely relevant to Hibernate users, with new features like atomic persistence context support, efficient clustering of conversation-scoped extended persistence contexts, and a brand new data access framework. Better yet, Seam is now easily deployable on J2EE application servers like WebLogic and WebSphere!

http://blog.hibernate.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2006/12/13#seam11-goes-ga

If you're using Hibernate and you have not yet tried out Seam, you're doing yourself a disservice ;-) Seam's stateful component model can certainly feel strange at first, especially to people with lots of experience building web applications using J2EE or Hibernate+Spring, but I've bet my career that this is the right way forward.

Enjoy!

congrats