Are Entity listeners only supported in Hibernate EntityManager, or are they supported in Hibernate Annotations as well? I can't get them working under Hibernate Annotations 3.2ga

only in HEM

Too bad, I think they are something that Hibernate should incorporate from the spec (and not the other way around)

But this feature is build on the hibernate event listener model which is much more flexible :-)
It should be possible to change the event listener to achieve the same feature (the code in hem does that and some other event changes, but it doesn't bootstrap in the eventlistener.initialize today (even if this should be possible)

But it also more of a vendor lock-in. I want to use my domain object across different persistence providers. (The reason why I'm not using JPA is that I can't get it to work with CMT under EJB 2.1. Spring doesn't provide a way to hook the into the transaction for jpa the way it does for hibernate)

ahem, so you use a proprietary API/configuration namely Interface21 Spring, to avoid having to use a standard API, namely JavaEE ;-)

Well, kind of ;-) Spring is used throughout the architecture. Having chosen one vendor lock-in doesn't open the door for the rest of the proprietary APIs, on the contrary.

It's not used as a alternative to JavaEE, it's used as to compliment JavaEE, and it's used as in a non-intrusive way.

The fact that my architecture uses Spring doesn't change the fact that JPA-style EntityListeners would be a nice feature in Hibernate Annotations. I would of course use Hibernate EntityManager (or another JPA PP) had it been possible in combination with EJB 2.1.