Harnessing Hibernate

Chapter 1. Installation and Setup

It continues to amaze me how many great, free, open source Java™ tools are out there. When I needed a lightweight object/relational mapping service for a JSP e-commerce project at the turn of the millennium, I had to build my own. It evolved over the years, developed some cool and unique features, and we’ve used it in a wide variety of different contexts. But, once I discovered Hibernate, we used that for new development instead of my own familiar system (toward which I’ll cheerfully admit bias). That should tell you how compelling it is!

If you’re looking at this book, you’re likely interested in a powerful and convenient way to bridge the worlds of Java objects and relational databases. Hibernate fills that role very nicely, without being so complicated that learning it becomes a daunting challenge in itself. To demonstrate that, this chapter guides you to the point where you can play with Hibernate and see for yourself why it’s so exciting.

Later chapters will look at using Hibernate as part of more complex environments such as Spring and Stripes, as well as using it with other databases. The goal of this first chapter is to show you how easy it is to put together a basic, self-contained environment in which you can explore Hibernate and do real things with it.

Getting an Ant Distribution

Although it might be surprising, the first few things you need to get Hibernate running have nothing to do with Hibernate itself. First, you must set up an environment ...