Harnessing Hibernate

Chapter 3. Harnessing Hibernate

All right, we’ve set up a whole bunch of infrastructure, defined an object/relational mapping, and used it to create a matching Java class and database table. But what does that buy us? It’s time to see how easy it is to work with persistent data from your Java code.

Configuring Hibernate

Before we can continue working with Hibernate, we need to get some busy work out of the way. In the previous chapter, we configured Hibernate’s JDBC connection using a hibernate.properties file in the src directory. In this chapter we introduce a way to configure the JDBC connection, SQL dialect, and much more, using a Hibernate XML Configuration file. Just like the hibernate.properties file, we’ll place this file in the src directory. Enter the content shown in Example 3-1 into a file called hibernate.cfg.xml within src, and delete the hibernate.properties file.

Example 3-1. Configuring Hibernate using XML: hibernate.cfg.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC
        "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration DTD 3.0//EN"
        "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd">

<hibernate-configuration>
  <session-factory>
    <!-- SQL dialect -->
    <property name="dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect</property> 

    <!-- Database connection settings -->  <property name="connection.driver_class">org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver</property> <property ...