It's my understanding that, out-of-the-box, Hibernate Tools can't currently generate Hibernate Validator annotations for the classes it reverse engineers from an existing database schema. Instead, it generates @Column annotations which aren't recognized by Hibernate Validator.

It would be really great if Hibernate Tools could generate these Hibernate Validator annotations. From what I've read, it seems like this requires the creation of a new exporter for Hibernate Tools.

My motivation for this request is that I have a requirement to validate my objects at the application-level, and I'm not currently using Hibernate to persist my objects, although I hope to in the future.

the templates in seam-gen does this.

I have refrained from adding it yet since it would not be JPA spec compatiable......and that db level validations not always equal to validations...but it would just require adding a new flag (validator true/false) and just check for that in the templates.

Is the "JBoss Seam Skeleton App" Hibernate Tools exporter the same thing as seam-gen?

In Hibernate Tools 3.2.0 beta 9, I was getting an exception while running the "JBoss Seam Skeleton App" exporter. I just upgraded to Hibernate Tools beta 10 and noticed that the "JBoss Seam Skeleton App" exporter has been removed, so I guess that's a moot question.

those templates were the old old predecessors of seam-gen