Java Persistence with Hibernate

3.4. Alternative entity representation

In this book, so far, we've always talked about a domain model implementation based on Java classes—we called them POJOs, persistent classes, JavaBeans, or entities. An implementation of a domain model that is based on Java classes with regular properties, collections, and so on, is type-safe. If you access a property of a class, your IDE offers autocompletion based on the strong types of your model, and the compiler checks whether your source is correct. However, you pay for this safety with more time spent on the domain model implementation—and time is money.

In the following sections, we introduce Hibernate's ability to work with domain models that aren't implemented with Java classes. We're basically ...