Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 2Integrating andConfiguring Hibernate

Compared to other Java persistence solutions, integrating Hibernate into a Java application is easy. The designers of Hibernate avoided some of the more common pitfalls and problems with the existing Java persistence solutions, and created a clean but powerful architecture. In practice, this means that you do not have to run Hibernate inside any particular J2EE container or framework—Hibernate 3 only requires Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), version 1.3 or greater, although the new Annotations feature requires J2SE 5.0 (or later).

At first, adding Hibernate to your Java project looks intimidating—the distribution includes a large set of libraries. To get your first Hibernate application to work, you ...