Hibernate

From Oxxus Wiki

Hibernate, developed under Open-Source community, represents powerful tool for Java developers in object management stored to classes and then to database. As databases cannot store objects, this tool provides ideal link between Java code, classes and projects developed in Java and storing any data to database. It has HQL (hibernate query language), a successor of SQL, sign-query language, developed to ease queries towards database.

This tool comes as library that can be used with j2ee server like JBoss, GassFish, or servlet container like Apache Tomcat. Once library is placed at hosting's lib folder, all features are available for any web application that uses Hibernate tool within developed source.

Hibernate latest release can be downloaded from its official pages and is offered as a bundle package or via Maven artifact repositories. Once downloaded it'll provide jar file, the latest one is hibernate3.jar, which has to be included into class path of project using features from hibernate and lib/required/ directory contains JARs Hibernate requires. All the jars in this directory must also be included in your project's classpath as well.

Configuration and Setup

Getting started with Hibernate requires jars to be placed into applications path-aware class folder and creation of a simple test database. Hibernate has to be configured within its hibernate.properties or even more sophisticated XML configuration file.

Since Hibernate will connect to database for application that uses Hibernate features, it needs proper configuration in order to know how to connect to database. This is defined within configuration with jdbc related directives, while complete tutorial with setup example is available at official Hibernate example pages.