This is to inform anyone that was having difficulty getting Hibernate 3 to work with JBoss 4.02 with EJB Preview 5.

The following needs to be done at the EJB Layer:

@Unchecked
 @TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRES_NEW)
 public Employee login() {
 EmployeeLogonDAO eldao = new EmployeeLogonDAO();
 Employee emp = getEmployee();
 try {
 if (emp != null) {
 //Log the employee
 EmployeeLogon elogon = new EmployeeLogon();
 elogon.setEmployeeID(emp);
 elogon.setLogontime(new Date());
 eldao.save(elogon);
 }
 }
 catch (Exception e) {
 log.error(e.getMessage());
 }
 return emp;
 }

At the DAO level there is an inner class that has the following:

 public static final ThreadLocal session = new ThreadLocal();

 public static Session currentSession()
 throws HibernateException {

 Session s = (Session) session.get();
 if (s == null) {
 try {
 SessionFactory sf = (SessionFactory) new InitialContext().lookup("java:hibernate/HibernateFactory");
 s = sf.openSession();
 s.setFlushMode(FlushMode.AUTO);
 session.set(s);
 }
 catch (Exception e) {
 e.printStackTrace();
 }
 }

 return s;
 }

 public static void closeSession() throws HibernateException {
 Session s = (Session) session.get();
 s.flush();
 session.set(null);
 if (s != null) s.close();
 }

This finally made it work where the updates and deletes were commited. I had to explicitly call s.setFlushMode(FlushMode.AUTO); and s.flush() to ensure that everything works.