H8A8 is intended as an alternative to XDoclet for Hibernate for those working with Hibernate 3 under Java 5.

H8A8 is an alternative to the Hibernate Annotations project. The Hibernate Annotations project uses annotations from the EJB3 specification and doesn't currently (summer 2005) allow the use of all hibernate features.

H8A8 instead makes available nearly all the mapping options currently available in Hibernate's xml mapping format as Java 5 annotations. Moving to H8A8 from hand-written mapping xml files or xdoclet-generated mapping files should be reasonably straightforward.